Apple has added a bunch of new capabilities to WebKit that power many new features in its Safari browser on iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26.
WebKit is a layout and rendering engine for web content that Apple developed and open-sourced, powering Safari and a few other browsers. As part of Apple’s renamed operating systems, Apple also changed Safari’s version number to 26.
According to the WebKit team, Safari in the first developer beta of iOS 26 brings 67 new features and 107 improvements. In this round, we’ll tell you about the most important WebKit changes that power new capabilities in Safari.
Saving websites as web apps on iPhone
iOS has long supported adding website bookmarks to the Home Screen, so you can open specific websites with a touch of an icon. And with the app’s default feature, these bookmarks open in whatever browser you’ve designated as your default.
Starting with macOS Sonoma, you can also add a website to the Mac’s Dock, but that actually saves the website as a web app instead of just adding a bookmark to the Dock. When clicked, a web app opens as a native app without browser chrome and integrates into system features like Expose, multitasking views and more.
With iOS 26, Apple has brought this change to the iPhone so websites are now also saved to the Home Screen as web apps. You can override this behavior if you’d like to save a website bookmark, like, before, by turning off “Open as Web App” after choosing “Add to Home Screen” from the share menu.
SVG website icons
Favicons, provided by websites, are displayed in many more places in iOS 26 than in previous iOS versions, including Safari’s Start Page, on the Home Screen and in the Dock. Safari 26 beta now supports SVG favicons. SVG, short for Scalable Vector Graphics, is a web-friendly format for vector images that can be scaled to any size without losing quality or resolution.
Safari uses these SVG favicons in many places throughout the interface, including bookmarks, favorites, the Start Page, the sidebar on the iPad and so on. SVG files are often smaller than the PNG format which is typically used for website icons.
Reporting web issues
With so many WebKit changes, some websites may not work properly until their developers implement compatibility changes for Safari. To that end, Apple is for the first time allowing reporting web issues in Safari on iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26. If the page doesn’t load at all, won’t load properly or is exhibiting other issues that cannot be resolved by reloading it, choose a new option labeled “Report an issue” in the “Page” menu.
You’ll need to answer a few questions before your report is submitted. The WebKit team says these reports provide it with the key information to “spot patterns and better ensure a great experience in Safari.”
HDR images
Safari 26 beta also brings support for high-dynamic range (HDR) images on the web that bring deep true blacks, pure bright whites and nuances in between. “You can embed images with high dynamic range into a webpage, just like other images — including images in Canvas,” says the WebKit team. Website creators can use a mix of standard dynamic range (SDR) and HDR video or images, or have the browser display all HDR content as SDR.
The latter ensures that overly bright HDR images don’t look out of place next to SDR content. This is an issue similar to scrolling through your Instagram feed and encountering a very bright shot-on-iPhone HDR video. Mixing HDR and SDR content can be distracting and creates a poor user experience, even more so given most media online probably won’t be HDR for awhile.
Safari was the first web browser to support JPEG XL and HEIC on the web. All told, Safari supports more than fifteen media formats, including WebM, VP8, VP9, Ogg Opus, and Ogg Vorbis codecs.
Web views in apps
Safari has also been available as an in-app browser in apps like Instagram to open links without yanking the user out of the app. On iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe and visionOS 26, apps can now take advantage of WebKit’s new API, designed from the ground up to work with Swift and SwiftUI.
This makes it easier for developers to integrate web content into their apps without invoking a full in-app browser. With the new WebView and WebPage types in the API, a developer only needs to provide a URL and WebKit does the rest.
Digital credentials
WebKit also enables support for the W3C’s Digital Credentials API in Safari 26, which lets websites and apps request identity documents like a driver’s license from the built-in Wallet app. To that end, iOS 26 lets you create a digital ID (initially using U.S. passports) in the Wallet app for use at TSA checkpoints and in apps. Apple already supports adding driver’s licenses to the Wallet app.
The WebKit team says the Digital Credential API may come in handy when renting a car online or accessing similar services that require a high-trust credential. “It provides a much safer and user friendly alternative to, for example, a user having to take a photograph of their driver’s license,” the team wrote.
WebGPU
Safari 26 replaces WebGL on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS with WebGPU, a JavaScript API for rendering 3D graphics without the use of browser plug-ins. WebGPU is preferred for new sites and web apps and it maps better to Metal and your device’s underlying hardware. According to the WebKit team, the older WebGL standard required significant translation overhead because it was derived from OpenGL which was designed prior to modern GPUs.
WebGL also allows for something WebGL hasn’t: general-purpose computations on the GPU, enabling web apps to tap into your GPU to accelerate image processing, visual effects and physics.
New CSS features
Safari 26 also supports new CSS features like anchoring one element to another, which the WebKit team says “pairs well with the popover attribute (which shipped in Safari 17.0), making it easy to create responsive menus, tooltips and more.”
Scroll-driven CSS animations that are based on time or how far the user has scrolled are also supported, allowing web developers to animate a group of items as they scroll into view. Safari 26 also adds support for the “text-wrap: pretty” style, a new text wrapping method that attempts to even out the ragged edge, improve hyphenation and prevent short last lines.
Other new CSS features supported by Safari 26 include the contrast-color() function, the CSS progress() math function that returns a number value representing how far along something is, and more.
Tidbits: 3D models, immersive media and more
Safari 26 on visionOS 26 also supports a new HTML element for embedding interactive 3D models into webpages that you can interact with, including in augmented reality, using the same USDZ files that already work with Apple’s AR Quick Look feature. Safari renders 3D models on webpages stereoscopically. “And if the user wants to see your models in their own space at real size, they can drag the models off the page with a single gesture,” writes the WebKit team.
Web developers can also implement lighting to 3D content by providing an environment map as any image. 3D objects can also animate, and the user can freely spin, tumble, scale and move them around.
Safari on visionOS 26 also supports immersive media types like spatial videos and Apple Immersive Video, as well as 180-degree and 360-degree videos and wide field of view (Wide FOV). “Embed your video on a webpage, and let users play it back immersively on a curved surface in 3D space,” says the WebKit team. Plus, Safari also supports HTTP Live Streaming for the immersive media types.
How to try the new Safari 26 features
You can test these capabilities right now if you have iOS 26, iPadOS 2, macOS Tahoe 26 or visionOS 26 beta installed on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Vision Pro. Otherwise, download Safari Technology Preview for macOS, a special version of Safari that includes features coming in the future. Be sure to peruse our WWDC25 roundup to learn what’s new across Apple’s new operating systems.
And if your Mac runs macOS Sequoia or Sonoma, you can download the Safari 26 beta to try out the latest features. However, doing so will replace your existing version of Safari with no way to revert to an earlier version.