The Most Common Surprise In Web Development
Every web development team has gone through this scenario. Developers spend three weeks building up and polishing a new feature, test it mercilessly in Chrome on their local machines, launch it confidently and wake up the next morning to a flood of support tickets from Safari users. This pattern is so consistent since the two browsers are running on totally different rendering engines. Chrome has an engine called Blink whereas Safari runs on WebKit. These two engines parse the meaning of the code written in the form of the languages (html, css and java script) slightly differently. Even a small difference in interpretation can entirely destroy the layout or prevent an interactive element from working or corrupt a form submission in a silent way.
Why Local Testing Almost Always Fails
Apple does not allow Safari to be natively installed on any non Apple operating system. This means any developer working on Windows or Linux does not have any way to run a true local copy of the browser. For many years teams attempted to work around this limitation with the use of virtual machines, but this approach has some serious downsides. Virtual machines are slow, require constant maintenance and updates, and almost never perfectly emulate the behaviour of a native installation. An online safari emulator solves this problem by hosting unmodified versions of Safari running on genuine macOS hardware in the cloud. Developers can connect directly to these instances through their existing browser, interact with them in real time, and test their application in a fully authentic environment. The best platforms also make every past major version of Safari available, which is especially critical because Apple users tend to run older versions of the browser for far longer than their Windows counterparts.
Common Pitfalls of Emulated Testing
The single biggest mistake teams make is assuming that all emulation is equally reliable. Many lower quality tools run modified versions of the WebKit engine that behaves noticeably differently than an official release of Safari. Even teams using high quality tools frequently make the error of only testing the very latest version of the browser. Industry statistics continually demonstrate that over 40 percent of active Safari users are running at least two major releases old. Best practice requires the testing of the three most recent major versions, and matching the version distribution found on the website’s own user analytics data. Teams also often forget that desktop Safari and mobile Safari are in fact two different variants of the engine with some significant differences in behaviour and capabilities.
Building Testing Into Your Workflow
The most reliable approach to cross browser quality requires teams to emulate safari consistently at every stage of the development process, not just as a final check before release. The highest performing teams run their full automated test suite against Safari on every single code commit. This catches compatibility issues immediately, when they are still easy and inexpensive to fix, rather than weeks later when the code has already moved to staging. Teams should also always supplement automated testing with periodic manual checks, because automated tests frequently miss subtle visual and usability issues that are immediately obvious to a human tester.
The end-result of this discipline speaks for itself. Safari currently holds 25 percent of the world browser market, and is the dominant browser on a number of demographics. Even small improvements in the compatibility of Safari translate reliably into higher conversion rates, lower support volume and better overall user satisfaction.
