December 26, 2025
Why doesn't the newest Safari work on older Macs?
There’s a cool new thing you can do in HTML that is supported by all the major web browsers, including Safari. But I can’t use it because, well, Safari.
You see, if you want the latest version of Safari, which has this cool new thing, you also need the latest or near-latest version of macOS. It’s been like this for several years now. Safari and macOS are joined at the hip.
Firefox, Chrome and Edge don’t have this problem. I can easily install the latest and greatest on my aging iMac. In fact, I switched to Firefox a few months ago because the old Safari on my old Mac was painfully slow.
Why can’t Apple make its latest version of Safari work with older versions of macOS? It seems insane that Mozilla — a small non-profit — can do this, but the behemoth that is Apple can’t or won’t. They should be embarrassed.