Flashy tabs and no Flash: Apple rolls out Safari 14 to macOS Catalina, Mojave users

End of the line for Adobe's multimedia nightmare on iGiant's browser

Ahead of the macOS Big Sur launch, Apple has released Safari 14 to the general public, granting Mojave and Catalina users access to the company's latest browser.

Many of the changes in the browser update are skin deep. The tab bar, for example, is redesigned to show more open pages, and displays favicons by default. Users can preview the content of pages by hovering over their corresponding tab in the bar. And the start page can now be customised with user-selected background images and links.

On the security front, Safari finally and conclusively purges support for Adobe Flash. This is hardly a surprise. Adobe will stop developing Flash by the end of the year, prompting every other browser developer to remove it (kinda), not least due to its overall obsolescence and endemic security problems.

Separately, Safari 14 takes a leaf from Brave's book, allowing users to see how many trackers have been blocked through a new Privacy Report page.

Those looking to jump on the bleeding edge can download Safari 14 through the System Update tool. As mentioned, you need to be using one of the two latest versions of macOS – and therefore have a Mac introduced after 2012. Of course, there are slightly naughty ways to get around this, if you're not prepared to invest in a new iShiny.

As is the case with most recent versions of Safari, it's unavailable for Windows as Apple discontinued support in 2012.

This isn't the only bit of browser news coming from the great doughnut in California – iOS 14 now allows punters to set a default mail and browser app other than the stock options.

Support for this is seemingly available on an app-by-app basis, although Edge, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Firefox, and Google Chrome are all known to work. ®