Apple announced a number of improvements to its Safari web browser during its WWDC keynote this week, including website icons (“favicons“) in tabs and automatic generation of strong passwords for websites. But you don’t need to wait for macOS Mojave or the official release of Safari 12 to test these new features out.
Apple has just released Safari Technology Preview 58, which introduces these Safari 12 features. It’s available now for both macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave. From the build’s release notes:
This release covers the same revisions of WebKit from Safari Technology Preview 57, but includes new Safari and WebKit features that will be present in Safari 12. The following Safari 12 features are new to Safari Technology Preview 58:
Icons in Tabs. You can enable showing website icons in tabs in Safari’s Tabs preferences.
Automatic Strong Passwords. Safari automatically generates strong, unique passwords when signing up for accounts or changing passwords on websites. New to Safari 12 and Safari Technology Preview 58, generated passwords can be customized using the
passwordrulesattribute. See Apple’s Password Rules Validation Tool for more information.Many more WebKit features in Safari 12 are present in this release of Safari Technology Preview and have been in past releases. You can read more about these changes and many others in What’s New in Safari 12.
Note that for both Mojave and High Sierra, the “website icons” feature is disabled by default. To enable it, head to Preferences > Tabs and check the box labeled Show website icons in tabs.
The Safari Technology Preview is effectively a rolling beta version of Apple’s web browser that introduces new features and technologies for testing by developers and websites. The project, first launched in March 2016, is free to all users and runs separately from the public version of Safari in macOS, meaning that you can safely test new features without having to give up the stable version of the app.
The Safari Technology Preview builds are hosted at Apple’s developer site, but you don’t need a developer account to download them.