![]() The next issue we discovered was that previewing projects just showed a blank screen in Construct. A tiny bit of transparency would be a transformation in our planning. It also worked in STP 166, not that it would really have helped to know.Īll this difficulty - and it could largely have been averted if Apple could just label an issue with the version it's fixed in, like all other browser makers do. I could not be totally sure our software was going to work in Safari until then. So the soonest I was able to personally verify whether it worked or not was today, April 3rd, a full week after the worldwide release of Safari 16.4. ![]() There was no way I could have known when to book time off avoiding the Safari release as there is no public release schedule. What did I do on that day? Nothing - I'd booked the Friday and the entire following week off for a holiday. There was just a single full working day in between. After an agonising couple of weeks wait, STP 166 came out on Thursday March 23rd, and then Safari 16.4 finally rolled out on Monday March 27th. Also consider that our only option to figure out what really ships is generally just to keep manually testing every Safari release, which means we have to waste time trying to find out something Apple surely already know. Meanwhile, consider that during everything else described in this post, we weren't able to open most projects in Construct. In the end we decided to see what Safari 16.4 shipped with. Unfortunately that doesn't answer the question: there is no particular guarantee that anything in STP will be in Safari 16.4. I asked whether the fix would ship in Safari 16.4, and an engineer responded talking about STP. Should we instead do nothing and hope Safari 16.4 ships with a working fix? But then we won't know if we face disaster or not until it's already rolling out. ![]() What should we do? Did they ship the fix and there's still a problem? Or did they not ship the fix yet? But why would they have done that when it was over a week since the fix? Should we assume Safari will ship broken compression streams and issue an emergency patch to work around it? Surely they wouldn't risk breaking zip.js for everyone? Even if we do that, we don't know how long we have left to act. The Safari 16.4 release seemed close - but we didn't know for sure, as we don't know its schedule. Then Safari Tech Preview 165 came out on March 8th. Not a bad response in the end, and good work by Apple employees. After some confusion about whether the issue was a duplicate of another (it wasn't), Apple engineers investigated, identified the problem, and said they had it fixed by February 27th. I duly reported the issue on February 17th. Potentially this also means many uses of zip.js across the web are broken too. ![]() Safari 16.4 added support for the Compression Streams API, but it was somehow incompatible with zip.js, which meant opening projects in Construct usually failed. Breaking opening projectsĬonstruct projects are based on zip files, and we use a popular library zip.js to read them, which in turn uses the Compression Streams API when supported. So when Safari 16.4 beta 1 was announced on February 16th (also not to any public schedule), we started taking a closer look - and there were a lot of problems. However when things start making their way to beta, it's time to look more closely. Pre-release browsers are usually pretty rocky with obvious issues that get sorted out soon enough. Apple provide Safari Technology Preview (STP), but it's only for macOS, and does not update to any public schedule. For example Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly update daily, and there's also less frequent dev and beta releases. Most browsers provide pre-release versions for early testing. I wanted to share our experience so customers, developers, regulators, and Apple themselves can see what we go through with what is supposed to be a routine Safari release. Early versions of Safari 16.4 broke opening projects, previewing projects, and all existing content published with Construct, all in different ways. We make the browser-based game creation app Construct. Safari 16.4 rolled out last week, and for us it's been a nightmare.
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