# Safari at WWDC '25: The Ghost of Christmas Past

DevFeed: [Safari at WWDC '25: The Ghost of Christmas Past](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/safari-at-wwdc-25-the-ghost-of-christmas-past-26551.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://infrequently.org/2025/06/the-ghost-of-christmas-past/>)

Author: Alex Russell

Published: 2025-06-13T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Alex Russell](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/alex-russell.md>)

Topics: [browsers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/browsers.md>), [Web platform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/web-platform.md>), [browser](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/browser.md>)

Tags: [apple](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/apple.md>), [browsers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/browsers.md>), [competition](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/competition.md>), [technical](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical.md>), [webdev](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/webdev.md>), [wwdc](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/wwdc.md>)

## AI overview

The article reviews Safari features announced at Apple's WWDC 2025, arguing that most were already available in Chromium-based browsers. It identifies a smaller set of areas where Safari may lead, while discussing uncertainty around beta availability and Apple's browser-engine requirements on iOS in the EU.

## Source excerpt

At Apple's annual developer marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here's the list, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromium: 2023: WebGPU 2020: SVG Favicons 2023: HDR Images 2024: CSS Anchor Positioning 2023: CSS text-wrap: pretty 2025: CSS progress() function 2023: Scroll-driven Animations (finally!!!) 2020: Trusted Types 2021: URL Pattern API early 2025: WebAuthN Signal API 2020: WritableStreams for the File System APIs late 2023: Scroll Margin for Intersection Observers 2025: CSS Logical Overflow (overflow-block and overflow-inline) 2024: CSS align-self and justify-self in absolute positioning 2025: a subset of Explicit JavaScript Resource Management 2021: AudioEncoder & AudioDecoder for WebCodecs 2020: RTCEncodedAudioFrame & RTCEncodedVideoFrame serialisation 2024: RTCEncodedAudioFrame & RTCEncodedVideoFrame constructors 2018: PCM format support in MediaRecorder 2017: ImageCapture.grabFrame() 2017(?): SVG pointer-events="bounding-box" 2015: <link rel=dns-prefetch> In many cases, these features were available to developers even earlier via the Origin Trials mechanism. WebGPU, e.g., ran trials for a year, allowing developers to try the in-development feature on live sites in Chrome and Edge as early as September 2021. There are features that Apple appears to be leading on in this release, but it's not clear that they will become available in Safari before Chromium-based browsers launch them, given that the announcement is about a beta: Digital Credentials API: currently in Chromium OT. CSS contrast-color() margin-trim: block inline extends a neat Safari-only feature in useful ways. Apple's ALAC format for MediaRecorder. Audio Output Devices API. In progress in Chromium, but no launch scheduled. The announced support for CSS image crossorigin() and referrerpolicy() modifiers has an unclear