> I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".

There's a new version of Safari Technology Preview [1] for macOS every two weeks.

There's a new version of Safari released every September for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. This has been the schedule for several years. Since Safari 26 shipped on September 15, 2025, there have been two updates for these platforms:

Safari 26.1 on November 3rd and 26.2 on December 12th.

The Safari team shipped 7 releases this year, averaging 7½ weeks between releases; not a significant difference from 4–6 weeks. Each major release of Safari for macOS runs on the current macOS version (Tahoe) and the two preceding ones—Sequoia and Sonoma.

BTW, there were 9 Safari releases in 2024, averaging 5.8 weeks apart.

It's not the first time Safari shipped a significant new feature before other browsers; :has(), Display P3 color support, JPEG-XL come to mind. At the end of the day, there's no NIH or Marketing team dictating the release schedule.

[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/

The Safari/WebKit people are doing good work, yes.

I use Safari as my default, and like every Firefox/Safari user I still get some bugs that don't occur in Chrome (not talking about WebMIDI obviously), so watching that 30 point gap between stable Safari and bleeding-edge WebKit (longer than 7½ weeks) on wpt.fyi was quite frustrating. The average Safari user would have a better browsing experience with a shorter fix delay, that's just the truth. Having to wait for macOS updates holds back the browser, unnecessarily.