Apple Releases Safari 14.1.2 Update for macOS Catalina and macOS Mojave

After using it the past 30 seconds, I can tell you that 14.1.2 feels dramatically, the same.

I never understood the way Apple insists the only way to get the latest (safest) version of Safari is through the last 2 OS releases. Anything older than that -- say, 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.13 (High Sierra) et al -- are not updated. Suddenly any software updates or security fixes require (currently) 10.15 and maybe 10.14. I won't even go into OS 11 B.S. Land (that's Big Sur, to you, sir).

To a degree, Firefox doesn't require this, not does Google Chrome doesn't require this. (They do have minimal OS requirements, though).

But what web browser (other than Apple's Safari) requires that your computer have the latest OS releases installed first?

It's just HTML coding, a bunch of videos, and web pages from around the world; in fact, I doubt many web pages are even created and updated on any of Apple's computers -- it's a Windows/Linux world, judging from the number of foreign language characters that show up on Mac-rendered web pages, all those  (and other geographcal-specific letterforms) that riddle (literally and figuratively) a typical printed web page from Mac Os.

Anyone still running iWeb --you know, "web design for the rest of us!" /s

It's just HTML coding, a bunch of videos, and web pages from around the world; in fact, I doubt many web pages are even created and updated on any of Apple's computers -- it's a Windows/Linux world, judging from the number of foreign language characters that show up on Mac-rendered web pages, all those  (and other geographcal-specific letterforms) that riddle (literally and figuratively) a typical printed web page from Mac Os.

Funny characters showing up on web pages almost invariably happens because web servers are serving text that is encoded in one character set, but claiming it's encoded in another character set, like text in the archaic Windows CP-1252 character set, but claimed to be modern Unicode UTF-8, or vice versa. This is a problem with webserver admins who don't know how to follow modern standards, not a problem with Macs. And, actually, from what little I've seen, there are quite a few web developers out there using Macs.

Text is just a stream of bytes - 8-bit numbers - that must be interpreted through a specified character set. Pretty much every character set of the past (many decades) agrees on how to interpret bytes 0x20 through 0x7f, in line with what was originally ANSI X3.4 (aka US-ASCII), but the interpretation of bytes over 0x7f varies wildly between character sets. Unicode, with UTF-8, gave us One True Way to handle that, and it's (wisely) what most of the world uses now, but there's still a lot of text out there in character sets like CP-1252, and a lot of misconfigured web servers blithely hand out that text without declaring the character set properly.

Another common mistake is UTF-8 encoding text that is already UTF-8 encoded, which makes a real mess out of any text outside of the ASCII range (this produces a pretty recognizable pattern).

But nice try blaming it all on macOS. Claiming this happens on a "typical" web page from macOS is exaggerating the situation by several billon percent.

Still loving Mojave on my 10,1 rMBP 2013!

After using it the past 30 seconds, I can tell you that 14.1.2 feels dramatically, the same.

Exactly. ;)

I never understood the way Apple insists the only way to get the latest (safest) version of Safari is through the last 2 OS releases. Anything older than that -- say, 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.13 (High Sierra) et al -- are not updated. Suddenly any software updates or security fixes require (currently) 10.15 and maybe 10.14. I won't even go into OS 11 B.S. Land (that's Big Sur, to you, sir).

To a degree, Firefox doesn't require this, not does Google Chrome doesn't require this. (They do have minimal OS requirements, though).

But what web browser (other than Apple's Safari) requires that your computer have the latest OS releases installed first?
snip snip

Anyone still running iWeb --you know, "web design for the rest of us!" /s

Just tried because you asked and iWeb still run, slowly but it does!