Apple Safari 16 official version released

On September 13, Apple launched the official version of iOS 16, and at the same time the official version of the Safari 16 browser was also released.

The most important change in Safari 16 is support for still images compressed using the AVIF format. Made by the Open Media Alliance, AVIF is another alternative to standard image formats such as JPEG and PNG that utilizes multiple color spaces, lossless and lossy compression, and other features.

This change has already been introduced in iOS 16, and will be added to Safari in macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16.1 later in October.

The Safari 16 browser for iOS 16 also includes support for Passkeys, a new alternative security type that provides a similar level of protection to using two-factor authentication or physical tokens.

Merchant tokens are also supported in Apple Pay, which helps improve the efficiency of recurring and multi-merchant payments. Order tracking support has also been added so that users can view order status in the Wallet app.

The update also includes elements such as Web Inspector Extensions, Container Queries, Subgrid, numerous accessibility improvements, object animation changes, overscroll behavior, and shared worker support.