The Safari beta is actually covering ~6 months of work in WebKit. So it isn't one release with 500 fixes. It is more of a consolidation.
But yes WebKit has been getting tons of feature gap and bug fixed in the past 2-3 years. I think it accelerated during Safari 17, and Safari 18 has been the release that I find it good enough for most cases and finally with no rendering issues on all the site I browse.
I have been trying to get the release note and update from Safari on HN frontpage but it never got much attention. Hopefully like you others will see how far Safari has come. And out of all the features coming from new macOS releases it has always been Safari that I am most looking forward to.
At the same time I still think it has some way to go before catching up to Firefox and Chrome is many areas. But at least it is improving fast.
It's because the EU is forcing competition on them for iOS Safari, and iOS Safari shares code with MacOS Safari. Now they have to at least try to keep up.
And it wasn't just laziness that made them drag their feet. They actively fear the web as a platform, and very much want everyone to do everything through their app stores, using their own macOS/iOS-exclusive proprietary SDKs... which also means developers themselves needing to acquire a Mac with XCode, and a Developer subscription.
But yes WebKit has been getting tons of feature gap and bug fixed in the past 2-3 years. I think it accelerated during Safari 17, and Safari 18 has been the release that I find it good enough for most cases and finally with no rendering issues on all the site I browse.
I have been trying to get the release note and update from Safari on HN frontpage but it never got much attention. Hopefully like you others will see how far Safari has come. And out of all the features coming from new macOS releases it has always been Safari that I am most looking forward to.
At the same time I still think it has some way to go before catching up to Firefox and Chrome is many areas. But at least it is improving fast.