Try Safari 15 Before You Buy, With Safari Technology Preview

MacOS 12 Monterey is not out yet — and, I hope, won’t ship until after a few more weeks of much-needed bug fixes — but Safari 15 for MacOS 11 Big Sur shipped last week. I strongly recommend not upgrading, unless you’ve already tried the new tab design and like it, or at least feel ambivalent about it. Updates like this are why I always turn off “Automatically keep my Mac up to date” in System Preferences → Software Update.

The sole reason I recommend not upgrading to Safari 15 is the new tab bar design. You can easily try it out for yourself, though, without upgrading to Safari 15 or installing the MacOS 12 betas. Safari Technology Preview is a separate version of Safari you can easily install next to regular Safari. Typically it’s used by web developers to test in-progress changes to WebKit, but right now it’s more useful as a way to preview the new Safari 15 tab design. It’s easy to install and easy to uninstall. You can even set it as your default web browser while testing in System Preferences: General.

★ Saturday, 25 September 2021