How to test Safari (and old Safari versions) on Windows and Linux

How to test Safari(including old versions) on Windows and Linux

If you’re like me, you’re not using a Mac, but you still need to test your website on Safari. This is a guide on how to test Safari on Windows and Linux. Norway and the norwegian cultural sector is a Mac-users environment. Not always updated versions though. So it was critical fo rme to ensure the webapp worked on old Safari versions. Here I’m talking Safari 15.3 when the current version was 18.0. So supporting a version almost 3 years old. Client is king (if they’re paying for the time spent on it).

So, how do you test Safari on Windows and Linux? The answer is Playwright. The End-to-end testing library I use and loooove.

The trick has already been shared multiple times by Kevin Powell or Wes Box among other, but here it is again, for me to remember.

This first command will run playwright using webkit (the Safari browser engine), using the latest version of Playwright and therefore the latest version of Safari too:

npx playwright wk https://raphaelferrand.com

But what about testing old Safari versions? Just use old versions of Playwright. It’s always shipping the latest-ish versions of the browsers. This being said you will also have an old version of Playwright. Which is bad if you want to do actual E2E testing. But if it’s just to have an in-browser look and debugging then it’s plenty enough.

npx playwright@1.15.2 wk https://raphaelferrand.com

Old Safari versions

And here is a short list of the Playwright versions corresponding to the Webkit (= Safari) versions:

WebKit 18.2 => Playwright 1.49.0
WebKit 18.0 => Playwright 1.48.2
WebKit 17.4 => Playwright 1.45.3 # I have not tested this version yet
WebKit 17.0 => Playwright 1.38.1 # I have not tested this version yet
WebKit 16.4 => Playwright 1.35.1 # I have not tested this version yet
WebKit 16.0 => Playwright 1.27.1 # I have not tested this version yet
WebKit 15.4 => Playwright 1.23.4 # I have not tested this version yet
WebKit 15.0 => Playwright 1.15.2
WebKit 14.2 => Playwright 1.13.1
WebKit 14.1 => Playwright 1.9.2

Some non self-executable versions

For versions of Playwright 1.23.4 until 1.45.3 running the command with the version specified inlined will not work. It will throw an error, for different reasons (e.g. “Executable doesn’t exist at …”, etc ). The solution is to actually install the playwright version you want (e.g. 1.27.1). Set this version as the version set in your “package.json” file, and then run the command.

npx playwright wk https://raphaelferrand.com

It’s a little more work, and you need to remember to revert this version afterwards from your “package.json”, but that will do the trick.