Safari on Linux

It is the year 2020, and Safari is the kid nobody wants to play with. IE11 was bullied out of school last year. Nobody cares for Opera. Web applications are made with Chrome and Firefox.

What happens when you need to fix a bug that can only be reproduced on Safari? Cold sweats.

Safari for Windows is dead. Webkit in Linux is a joke. I don’t own a mac. In coronavirus time, It is not possible to grab a mac from a colleage for a few minutes. Browserstack is a huge pain to setup for local development in Linux.

Luis told me to give this a look: https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox. It is a script to create and setup a MacOS Virtual Machine downloading the files straight from Apple servers. What, no need to risk your life with a hacked iso anymore? yeah, that’s right.

It is the year 2020 and Windows is free and MacOS seems to be free as well.

I skeptically ran the script. Half an hour later I has amazed with a butter smooth Mac experience. The script only needed my input to push the enter key a handful of times.

I don’t know about the whole mac experience, but for web development you only need Safari, and this thing works, it works beautifully. It is hands down the best way for Linux and Windows developers to debug Safari-exclusive layout bugs.

** UPDATE: ** A friend told me it violates Apple TOS because you can only run a MacOS VM on mac hardware. No free lunch after all. Kids, do this at home! Professionals, do not do this at work!