In Safari Web Extensions on iOS 18, declarativeNetRequest Rulesets and Dynamic Rules take over twice as long to apply -- which causes rulesets to often fail to apply before sites load. In a boilerplate Xcode project you can note the time difference toggling the OISD (https://oisd.nl) ruleset on iOS 17 and iOS 18 simulators. Additionally, if you force quit Safari and reopen to a site with ads blocked by OISD list (e.g. espn.com) the content will be blocked in that initial state on iOS 17, but not in iOS 18 due to the latency. Based on the boilerplate extension, this bug is impacting all Mobile Safari Extensions using declarativeNetRequest Rulesets and Dynamic Rules. We know several other extension developers dealing with this issue. Our team wrote detailed reproduction steps in our Feedback Assistant ticket: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/15196130 but have received no responses. I would attach a screen recording here but it won't allow me.

I am working Web to App flow for my product. Tolink to my app from web service, I define uri scheme from app and use it from my web site. But, when I try to use this scheme from mobile safari web, It sometimes failed with message that uri is invalid. That is weird It failed SOMETIMES not always Even I tried with same url. In my device, there is current version app. Why this happen? How can I resolve this issue?

This is problematic when opening links to other websites that require separate authentication. A typical example would be a Gmail web app, and then trying to open a link to a GitHub PR. In the 18.0 release notes, this is mentioned as Added support for opening links directly in web apps on macOS. (113034778 It'd be great if this could be customizable so that one could choose the old behavior.

Since iPadOS 18.x WKWebView seems to have a bug within its Fullscreen API (which can be enabled via WKPreferences.isElementFullscreenEnabled). This bug has the effect that websites trying to make an element (for example a video player) fullscreen fail to do so. This does not always happen, most of the time the fullscreen mode does work fine, but sometimes (far too often to be ignored) it does not. If an instance of WKWebView shows this issue, it can not be "fixed" by reloading the page or loading other pages, this issue exists in this instance forever. My App is a web browser App so I can create and remove WKWebView instance easily (by opening or closing Tabs). And there are times where I never see this bug, and times where ever other tab shows this bug. It's totally unreliable. The App does not show any issues at all when running under iPadOS 17 or older. The issue is only present under iPadOS 18.x. After some testing I've found out that when the bug has affected an instance of WKWebView, the JavaScript call element.requestFullscreen() will work if the element is a video element, but does no longer work if it is another element (like a DIV). If an instance of WKWebView is not affected by this bug, element.requestFullscreen() will work for all HTML elements. Does anyone has experienced this bug as well? And maybe found a workaround? Or maybe found a pattern which helps to find out what exactly is triggering this bug?

I'm developing an application that utilizes WKWebView to display a webpage. My goal is to improve the performance and loading speed of this webpage by intercepting specific API calls and providing pre-stored JSON responses directly from within the app, ensuring the webpage renders instantaneously. The challenge I am encountering is the inability to intercept HTTPS URL schemes directly from WKWebView. Any insights or solutions from the community on how to effectively manage and overwrite these particular network requests would be greatly appreciated.

When user opens a new tab and loads a website, the declarativeNetRequest.getMatchedRules() returns nil and on reloading in the same tab it returns the URLs blocked. Is this an expected behaviour?

Hi, I had been working on an extension without any issues, running it from Xcode and debugging locally in Safari. However, without making any code changes, and after uninstalling the extension, it stopped appearing in Safari after building for local debugging. Does anyone know what might be happening or how I can clean up the system? Thanks a lot and best regards.

Hi. I've noticed on both iOS 17 and iPadOS 16 that when an user opens a website in a WKWebview (e.g from Gmail), then requests it to be opened in the external Safari app (through the "compass" icon), their localStorage data is not transferred to the Safari tab. This behaviour breaks web experiences that rely on data being locally stored, e.g auth tokens or user identification data. It effectively stops users from being able to use some websites outside of an in-app context. I am aware of Webkit's tracking prevention mechanisms such as https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#partitioned-third-party-localstorage, but I don't think this should apply to this case. Here the user is navigating between two Safari tabs (one internal and one external) on the same domain, exact same URL, by pressing a native Safari webview icon. There is no third-party cross-domain tracking happening. Is this a bug or intended behaviour?

I have noticed that tabs.onRemoved works differently in Safari 18 comparing to other browsers and Safari 17. Open a tab e.g. apple.com Take note of the active tab id using this code: browser.tabs.query({currentWindow: true, active: true}, (x) => console.log(x[0].id)) Add a listener on onRemoved: browser.tabs.onRemoved.addListener(console.log) on the active tab, navigate to e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org Take note of the active tab id again (using the same tabs.query). Expect: there should be no console.log of onRemoved. the active tab id stays the same. Actual: there is a console.log of onRemoved. the active tab id is changed. Please help. If this is a bug introduced in Safari 18, it would break a lot of JS Web extensions.

I have a homepage with an iframe containing my app LocalStorage, but when opening my app page the LocalStorage is lost. structuration of the page: homepage : domain.com iframe and app : app.domain.com the localstorage is set up directly within the iframe and postmessage between iframe and parent works. We see in the parent page that the LocalStorage for the sub-domain is set but opening the sub-domain on a new window it disappears : The problem is detected On Safari 18 only.

We used declarativeNetRequest.getMatchedRules() to retrieve the blocked URLs. While we do receive a list, we noticed that the URLs captured do not always reflect the ones the content blocker is actively blocking at that moment. However, upon reloading the same page, the correct URLs appear. Screenshots are attached for your reference. First load: After reload:

I have noticed that storage.local.get API works differently in Safari 18 compare to other browsers and Safari 17. browser.storage.local.set({abc: 123}) browser.storage.local.get(console.log) // {abc: 123} browser.storage.local.get({abc: null}, console.log) // expect {abc: 123} but got undefined instead. According to MDN, storage.local.get should work with an object with object names as keys and the default value as value. According to Safari 18 Release notes, this may be related to a fix: 'Fixed getting an empty key from storage. (99440265) (FB11427769)'.

We are using declarativeNetRequest.getMatchedRules() to get the matched rules' URLs. When user switches website in the same tab, it returns URLs which were blocked in the previous website also, within past 5 minutes. Is it possible to fetch getMatchedRules() only for current webpage in the same tab?

Hi, I am developing the Click & Read web add-on for Chromium, Firefox and Safari. We use xcrun safari-web-extension-converter tool to generate the Safari add-on. The build on Xcode had no meaning errors/warnings, until we had to switch to a more up-to-date MacBook (required as deprecated Mac had no support for latest macOS and thus for Xcode compatibility !). So now I build my add-on on an Apple M1 MB Air on Sequoia 15.0 with latest Xcode, but I encounter an error ? or warning ? : NSBundle file:///System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MetalTools.framework/ principal class is nil because all fallbacks have failed Unable to create bundle at URL ((null)): normalized URL null Unable to create bundle at URL ((null)): normalized URL null Unable to create bundle at URL ((null)): normalized URL null But it doesn't prevent the add-on build to complete as I am able to open it onto Safari. Then, when loading the add-on on a test web page, I get this error on safari console: Error: Invalid call to runtime.connect(). No runtime.onConnect listeners found. BTW, the same add-on Dist works as expected on Chrome or Firefox (on macOS). So it seems the runtime listener runtime.onConnect.addListener isn't initiated on Background script... Thanks for your feedback and help

After updating Xcode to the latest version we observed that SFSafariViewController is not loading web pages on Xcode 16 Simulator with iOS 18, whenever it is presented the View Controller is empty (does not load any content) and the app freezes, but other screens that use WKWebView are working normally. Also, during tests on physical devices with iOS 18 it seems to work just fine, so it might be just a IDE version problem. Is anyone experiencing the same issue? If so, did anyone find a solution for it?

Hi everyone, I’m working on an app that uses WKWebView. Due to security concerns, our customers want the app to disable copy-paste functionality and similar options (such as Lookup and Share, allowing users to extract text from the app or save it as a file. I was able to disable copy-paste and remove UIMenu options like Lookup and Share. Everything worked fine until the iOS 18.1 beta, which introduced a new menu called Writing Tools (Apple Intelligence) that has its own copy and share buttons I've tried several ways to remove it Remove all UIMenu items using canPerformAction, and it works for all menus but Writing Tools, which still remains override func canPerformAction(_ action: Selector, withSender sender: Any?) -> Bool { return false } Remove it from UIMenuBuilder override func buildMenu(with builder: UIMenuBuilder) { builder.remove(menu: .lookup) builder.remove(menu: .share) } But unfortunately, UIMenuBuilder does not have an identifier for Writing Tools, and it seems like there are no API changes from Xcode 15 to Xcode 16 (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uimenu/identifier) It seems like the only way to disable it through MDM configuration (key: allowWritingTools), but we don't use MDM https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/restrictions Environment iOS Version: iOS 18.1 beta4 Device: iPhone 15 Pro App platform: iOS Xcode version: 16.0 MacOS: 15.0 Thank you

Hi! We are having a hard time with the universal link, help is appreciated! Thanks in advance! The universal link doesn't work after installation for some time. A user has to wait for from 5 to a couple of hours after the app is installed on the device. This has also affected App reviewers since we need the universal link to work for successful login. Each submission will receive a rejection of we cannot login and it will be approved until we kindly ask them to try again. I believe the JSON is delivered to devices by Apple's CDN system and the fact that it works on most devices most of the time should imply that we have a valid apple-app-site-association setup. So I am really confused about the wait time, which is giving us trouble with app review and a bad user experience

Safari cannot open the page due to the error 'WebKit encountered an internal error.' We are using https://github.com/stleamist/BetterSafariView.git, and it was working fine before we updated to Xcode 16.

I am using two iPhone11 devices, having iOS v17.6.1 for automation testing using Seleniumv4.X-Appium v2.x. Today I updated the mac to Sequoia15 version which updated the XCode to v16. Just after this update, I could not able to run the previously running automation script. The console message is "org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: Could not start a new session. Response code 500. Message: Unable to launch WebDriverAgent. Original error: xcodebuild failed with code 70. This usually indicates an issue with the local Xcode setup or WebDriverAgent project configuration or the driver-to-platform version mismatch."

I have a hybrid mobile app which loads web server screens in its iframe(which is under the WKWebView); an https request is initiated from the mobile app to the web server which returns the html page to be loaded in the iframe. The calls which are initiated from outside the iframe have cookies maintained in their requests, while the ones initiated from inside the iframe(web server page) loose the cookies and do not inherit them in IOS beta 18 while It worked fine in the previous IOS versions. Anybody has infos about this or similar cases?