This is Technology Bytes, episode 161 for April 5th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology. Enjoy, and here we go. You know by now that I use the latest beta, I actually do the developer beta, which is probably not what I’m supposed to do, but that’s who I am, on all of my devices. So, I have been running the 26.x, whatever that happens to be, developer beta, since almost the very beginning. I held off for maybe a minute, it feels like, and so it has been fairly stable. There haven’t been a lot of huge updates. Every time I get on this podcast, I talk about, well, maybe 26.3 is going to bring Siri something, maybe 26.4, nope, nothing’s happening. But this time, I updated to the 26.5 beta 1, everything has always worked, and today I want to talk about Safari in that update. So, Safari 26.5 beta 1 is, you know, it comes with the operating system, so it updates when you do those updates. And as I said, I’ve been running old, I mean, running every beta since the beginning. Everything has been very stable. I used some tools that we develop ourselves that run on the web for work, and so Safari is important. And so I updated my MacBook Air, and I updated my iPad, thinking that it’s just going to be like before. And I was curious to see what was new, read a little bit before I do the update to see if anyone’s having issues, and then I run the update. I did not think anything would break. We’re well into the 26-point betas at this point. Nothing has happened. Everything has been running solid. And then all of a sudden, one site I use for work, it’s our own development, it’s our own website, it’s not used by anybody else, it has decided, or the update that Apple did broke that one site. The problem that I have is that this ends up being kind of a finger-pointing thing. If I talk to my IT crew, they’re like, well, you’re running Apple products, Apple broke something, we don’t support Safari, so we don’t need to spend any cycles of brain power to try to fix this for you because you’re the only one that it’s broken for. And I fully understand that, and I know that that’s the environment that I live in. Our CTO often tells me, I’m always surprised that you get as much done as you do using Apple products because we don’t write for Apple products whatsoever. And so the fact that you’re able to use them and do all your work and do it well is always a surprise to me. And so I never really go back. Every once in a while, I will and say, hey, this broke, this is the message that I’m getting, do you have any insight to what might be happening? And then the good news is that I didn’t update my iMac, so the one site, our sales tool site that it’s called, still works on my iMac, so I was able to use that. But the portable version, when I’m out on the floor walking through production, I cannot load that site on my iPad. It’s a bit problematic, but not terrible because there’s a couple other ways for me to get to some of the information but not interact properly with it. And so I end up having to live with that. So there are a few things that I do to try to fix those issues, and I’ll talk about those for a couple minutes here. One of the things I often do is try to load an alternate web browser to see if that solves the problem. And oftentimes it does, and so I have Chrome installed so I can switch to that if something goes haywire. Chrome is what we use throughout our production environment. And so I put Chrome on my iPad, and no success. That site just won’t load. It just times out, and very cryptic error messages, and I kind of read through them, try to figure out what I need to do. And then I tried Firefox, and then I tried Edge, and nothing worked. And then I was trying to load the site on my iPad one other time just to see if anything could break it loose, clearing caches, doing all kinds of things to see if I could make the site work once again. And it came up and said a WebKit issue, and so at least that gave me some direction. So WebKit is what Apple uses as the basis of the Safari web browser. And on iOS and iPadOS, everyone that builds a browser for those environments builds it using WebKit. So that explains why switching to Chrome or Firefox or any other browser for that matter was not fixing the problem for me. Now, interestingly enough, in the EU, because of laws that they have passed, Apple has to allow non-WebKit browsers on their iPad and on their iPhone. But that doesn’t extend to the United States environment. So I was trying to see if I could get a non-WebKit browser to run on my iPad, and it seemed like it was a little sketchy to maybe do that at all. And so I chose to just have to limp along on my iPad. I’m hoping the next beta that maybe comes out next week will help. But because it’s a WebKit issue, I knew I could run Chrome on my MacBook Air, and it would load the site properly. And that is what happened. And so I was able to get to our sales tool on my MacBook Air. I’d never updated my iMac, so that works. So that only left my iPad as the one device out of the loop because I don’t use the browser on my iPhone for work. So I don’t understand exactly what broke, and I almost never do. This happened sometime in the past, and I don’t know if it was when iOS 26, the very first time it came out, potentially, or maybe it was, yeah, I don’t know. But a very long time ago, these tools broke, and I was able to use Chrome to run those, but maybe not on my iPad. It might have been a similar situation. But I know Apple is not opposed to having old web technology not work on their platforms anymore, thinking that people need to write more modern apps or web apps, whatever, websites for whatever they are having people use them for. And our sales tool at work is very old. It was something not written by our CTO, so he doesn’t like it. We have tried to move on from it, and I think eventually we will, and maybe this problem goes away. But in the meantime, I’m hoping that next week a new beta will come out, and maybe it will get fixed. I don’t know why. Or maybe we do an update to the sales tool because we need to add some functionality, and that changes something, and so then it works. But in the meantime, I’m just going to have to limp along. So lessons, and these are the hard ones for me to learn, is not to update everything just in case. So in this case, having my iPad as my mobile environment for work is probably the last one I should have updated. When I update the MacBook Air, that’s fine because then I have a Chrome backup if something breaks, and I know that should work. And then if I don’t update my iPad so I still get the tools that I need, then that would be better. So going forward, I usually update my phone first, and then I update my iPad, then I update my MacBook Air, then I update my iMac. That’s kind of the mode that I go through. And now I think I’m going to have to switch that up a little bit. I’m going to need to do my MacBook Air first, and if it works and nothing breaks, then everything else gets updated. But if that one breaks, then I don’t update my iMac, I don’t update my iPad, I still do my phone, I still do my watches, because I don’t use those for work, and that one thing that broke is not going to be problematic for me. So learning lessons, updating, of course, I’m probably going to still trip over myself on occasion, because that’s the way it works in my world. That is all I have for today. If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at meritfamily.com. As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
