There’s a 33-minute video (and resources) over on apple.com covering the upcoming Safari changes we saw in the WWDC keynote this year in much more detail. Look who’s got a little cameo in there:
Perhaps the most noticeable thing there in Safari 15 on iOS is URL bar at the bottom! Dave was speculating in our little Discord watch party that this probably fixes the weird issues with 100vh stuff on iOS. But I really just don’t know, we’ll have to see when it comes out and we can play with it. I’d guess the expectation is that, in order for us to do our own fixed-bottom-UI stuff, we’d be doing:
.bottom-nav { position: fixed; /* maybe sticky is better if part of overall page layout? */ bottom: 100vh; /* fallback? */ bottom: calc(100vh - env(safe-area-inset-bottom)); /* new thing */
}On desktop, the most noticeable visual feature is probably the theme-color meta tags.
This isn’t even a brand new Apple-only thing. This is the same <meta> tag that Chrome’s Android app has used since 2014, so you might already be sporting it on your own site. The addition is that it supports media queries.
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ecd96f" media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#0b3e05" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">It’s great to see Safari get aspect-ratio and the new fancy color systems like lab() and lch() as well. Top-level await in JavaScript is great as it makes patterns like conditional imports easier.
I don’t think all this would satisfy Alex. We didn’t exactly get alternative browser engines on iOS or significant PWA enhancements (both of which would be really great to see). But I applaud it all—it’s good stuff. While I do think Google generally takes privacy more seriously than what general internet chatter would have to believe, it’s notable to compare each company’s newly-released features. If you’ll forgive a bit of cherry-picking, Google is working on FLoC, a technology very specifically designed to help targeted advertising. Apple is working on Private Relay, a technology very specifically to making web browsing untrackable.
