Safari 15.1
Apple has released Safari 15 for macOS 11 Big Sur and 10.15 Catalina. Although security fixes are the ostensible reason for the release, it also reverts to the previous interface approach for tabs (for more details, see “Hot New Features in Safari in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15,” 23 September 2021). The update addresses an information leakage issue that could be used by malicious websites using Content Security Policy reports, improves memory handling to address a buffer overflow issue that could lead to arbitrary code execution, and resolves a logic issue that could lead to unexpectedly unenforced Content Security Policy. You can download Safari 15.1 only via Software Update. (Free, various sizes, macOS 10.15+)
Safari 15.1 for Big Sur has just been released.
Good news is the BS with tabs above favorites has been reverted.
Bad news is the bug that tabs don’t load in background until they are made active is still around.
I recently installed Safari 15.1 on Catalina, and I’m seeing two problems in particular. In a tab group that I’m using heavily, when I click on a link on a webpage, frequently it will flash the new page, but immediately return to the previous page. It’s not like the Back button got accidentally clicked because the Forward button is grayed so won’t take me to the new page, so I have to re-click the link. This has happened probably about 20 times in the last two days. The other problem, which I’ve seen less frequently, maybe 5 times, is when I click on a link on a page in a central tab in the group, it jumps to the last tab in the group. While I’m on about Safari, a 3rd problem I’ve seen just once is that a particular site’s search feature kept returning zero matches even when I was sure there should be a match. I quit Safari, relaunched it, did the identical search, and got my results. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to reproduce any of these problems. They just seem to happen randomly.