I recently made a comment regarding testing webapps and compatibility on Safari (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421554#35436004) and got a pointer towards https://webkit.org/downloads/ but these are browsers/implementations on Linux, as a primary Windows user do I have to use Linux in order to test WebKit?
Why isn't there a WebKit based browser for Windows; I am pretty unaware on the topic and a lot of forum-searching and trying to build my own WebKit wrapper to run on Windows has led me to the conclusion it's a very painstaking process to work out a maintainable WebKit browser for Windows.
Here are a few things I have tried to test on Safari, purely from Windows:
- Install Epiphany on WSL2: This is slow but bearable; works OK but took a lot of setup since WSLg doesn't work well with Debian/Fedora and I had to give into installing Ubuntu.
- Use BrowserStack: Expensive, slow, don't want to pay just to test on Safari.
- Playwright Mini Browser: Very minimal, drag/drop events don't work; lot of incompatibility, not well-maintained.
- Using TeamViewer to use my partner's Mac
- The worst of them all; setting window.* as undefined to mimic features not supported on Safari.
My question therefore is, how do you all test on Safari who may be stuck in a similar position as me, unable to afford a Mac; and a primary machine on Windows. Note; I have a dual-boot Linux system but I parallelly work on some CUDA applications whose drivers have been horrible to set up and I do not want to keep switching OSs whenever a bug arises.
In the past I would test it via crossbrowsertesting.com, and that's worth a shot, as it can provide tunneling software to your local environment.
Recently I've chosen to treat it the same way as any other closed platform: I don't support it and don't wish its poison to propagate further. Granted, I am but an irrelevant drop in an ocean.