From its first announcement of Apple silicon Macs on 22 June 2020, there has been speculation as to when support of Intel models will cease. Now Apple has given exceptionally clear details of its future intentions, and we have a clearer idea of what’s coming in macOS Tahoe, we can make plans at last. This article looks at the years ahead. In each case, major events are scheduled to occur with the annual transition of macOS to the next major version, normally in September-October.

2025

Final security update for macOS 13 Ventura, ending support for:

• iMac 18,1-3
• MacBook 10,1
• MacBook Pro 14,1-3.

If you’re still running Ventura on a Mac capable of Sonoma or later, now is the time to plan the upgrade.

2026

Final security update for macOS 14 Sonoma, ending support for:

• MacBook Air 8,1-2.

First release of an Arm-only version of macOS, 27. However, that and all its updates will continue to include full support for running Intel binaries using Rosetta 2 translation. macOS 27 will be the last major version that supports Rosetta 2 fully in Virtual Machines.

2027

Final security update for macOS 15 Sequoia, ending support for:

• iMac 19,1-2
• iMac Pro
• Mac mini 8,1
• MacBook Air 9,1
• MacBook Pro 15,1-4 16,3.

First release of macOS 28, with full Rosetta 2 support removed. Limited Intel binary support will continue for “older unmaintained gaming titles” only. As a result, virtual machines running macOS 28 will no longer be able to run most Intel binaries.

2028

Final security update for macOS 26 Tahoe, ending support for all remaining Intel models:

• iMac 20,1-2
• Mac Pro 7,1
• MacBook Pro 16,1-2 16,4.

T2 firmware updates are almost certain to cease with the end of support for macOS 26. Major third-party vendors are likely to stop providing Universal binaries, as they too drop support for macOS 26 and Intel models. Apple may decide to remove x86 support from Xcode 29, but hasn’t yet made any statement either way.

Benefits of upgrading macOS in Intel models

Although macOS Sequoia and Tahoe have brought some new features for Intel Macs, much of Apple’s emphasis now requires Arm systems. Major reasons for upgrading your Intel Mac to the most recent version of macOS it can run include:

• Third-party support. Major software vendors like Microsoft normally only support their products on versions of macOS still supported by Apple.
• Safari is only updated in supported versions of macOS.
• Bug fixes. Although new versions bring their own bugs, the chances of an existing bug being fixed in the current release of macOS are far greater than it being fixed in an older version.
• Security vulnerabilities. Only the current version of macOS gets a full set of fixes in each round of security updates, and the older two supported versions often lag the current one.
• Enhancements. Some new features are still provided for both platforms.
• Compatibility. If you already use Apple silicon Macs, or intend doing so, they are more compatible when running the same version of macOS. One topical example is Tahoe’s new ASIF disk image format.
• Quantum-secure encryption. Apple has already started to transition to cryptographic techniques designed to remain secure as and when quantum computers are used in the future to break older methods. This started with iMessage last year, and Apple has announced that macOS 26 Tahoe will support quantum-secure encryption in TLS. This is unlikely to be added retrospectively to older versions of macOS.

I hope you find that helpful in your planning, and wish you success in whatever you choose.

I don’t always hit the right keyboard shortcuts. Of those that I commonly get wrong, by far the most serious are Command-W and Command-Q in Safari. While the former just closes the frontmost window, the latter quits the whole app, and can lose the contents of online forms. Why can’t Safari show a confirmation alert before quitting, so I can cancel those unintentional quits?

No alert is going to stop you from using the wrong keyboard shortcut. All it will do is annoy you every time you want to quit Safari and press the correct keys. At worst, when you press Command-Q but intended Command-W, you’ll accidentally click on the wrong button in the alert and go ahead with quitting Safari. The error isn’t quitting the app, it’s pressing the wrong keys, and you’ll continue to do that unless you train yourself out of it, or change your practice to make it more robust.

Historically, keyboard shortcuts for quitting apps and closing windows have long been set as Command-Q and Command-W, as Q stands for Quit and W for Window. It’s unfortunate that the two keys are immediately adjacent, so making it easy to press the wrong one, particularly if you hunt and peck for keys rather than being a touch typist.

If you’re having this problem in Safari, then you’re most likely doing the same in other apps, although its impact there may not be as apparent. That’s because most other apps track changes made in open documents for this purpose, but that’s not something that Safari can do with web pages, as entering your own text within them is tracked by the remote web server, not the browser. This should be mitigated by any website that you’re entering text into: the server should either record those entries as you make them, or at least give you the option of saving them. That’s a basic expectation of accessible website design.

Solution

You may find it helpful to enable Ask to keep changes when closing documents in Desktop & Dock settings. Coupled with disabling the control below, to Close windows when quitting an application, that should bring more protective app behaviour.

It might seem tempting to try changing the shortcut for Quit, but as far as I can see, you can’t do that for all apps. Changing it for just one or a few introduces a major inconsistency, and only increases the risk of error.

The best way you’re going to address this is to remove its root cause, by not pressing Command-Q when you don’t want to quit Safari, and that requires you to close windows a different way. Readily available in macOS is the choice of:

• closing windows by clicking on their red Close button at the top left;
• using the Close command in the File menu;
• assigning a different key combination, and using that to close windows in all apps.

Although you don’t appear able to change the shortcut for Quit in all apps, you can for Close. Open Keyboard settings, click on Keyboard Shortcuts…, then on App Shortcuts at the left. Click on the + tool to add a new shortcut, and set that for All Applications, with a Menu title of Close, and a shortcut of something like Command-Shift-M. You may find Apple’s list of keyboard shortcuts helpful to ensure there are no conflicts. Whichever you choose, you should apply it consistently across all your apps. This keeps it standard and simple and makes it automatic.

Of those three options, my preference is invariably for the first, using the window’s Close button. That’s because it works independently of whichever window is at the front and ‘in focus’. With a little care checking which window you apply it to, it should be completely free of error. The disadvantage of both the Close menu command and its shortcut Command-W is that you might have a different window in focus, so sometimes you will end up closing the wrong one by mistake.

Training

Once you have chosen which to use, train yourself rigorously to use that, and that alone. When working with single-window apps you have the choice of using either, and you should consciously go through the process of thinking that through before deciding which control to use, to remind yourself of what you are doing and why.

The goal is to make closing windows and quitting apps, including Safari, thoroughly reliable processes, so you never make a mistake. That makes any warning alert superfluous, and you’ll then agree that it would only serve to irritate. That’s why better interface guidelines caution against displaying an alert unless there’s a compelling reason to do so, and not routinely whenever quitting an app.

Although taken for granted now, Apple didn’t release the first version of Safari until January 2003. Before that was a succession of interesting experiments to try. Those started with Netscape Navigator in 1994, which lasted until 2007, although by then it was little used on Macs.

Netscape is seen here in 2000, following my successful purchase of downloadable versions of Conflict Catcher and Suitcase from Casady & Greene’s online store.

Two years later, and I’m browsing Amazon’s listing of my never-published book that was slated for 31 March the following year. I’m so glad I never pre-ordered it.

Netscape had been at the front of browser development, leading with on-the-fly page display, cookies and JavaScript. But in 1996, it was challenged by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Apple’s more innovative Cyberdog. The latter was sadly abandoned the following year, leaving the way clear for Apple to replace the bundled Netscape with Internet Exploder, as it quickly became nicknamed.

This is Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2001, providing the front end to Mac OS X Server through Webmin.

Cookie settings in Explorer were highly detailed in 2005.

Many of us abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives such as Camino. That had originated within Netscape as Chimera in 2002, based on its Gecko layout engine, with a native Mac OS X front end. The following year it was rebranded as Camino, and amazingly lasted until 2012.

There were other competitors, such as Omni Group’s OmniWeb, which had been developed for NeXTSTEP since 1995, then moved to Mac OS X until 2012.

This is OmniWeb in 2007, showing the different browsers it could identify itself as, including a single version of Safari 1.0.

In January 2003, Apple launched the first beta-release of its own browser, Safari, and bundled it in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther when it was released that October. Since then Safari has been a regular fixture in successive versions of Mac OS X, OS X, and macOS. For several years, it was the only browser on iOS and iPadOS.

This is Safari 1 showing the front page for Apple’s developer site in 2004, complete with the offer to download Xcode version 1.5 with dead code stripping as a new feature. That year, Mozilla Firefox was released as an alternative, and has continued to support Macs ever since.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came with Safari as the only bundled browser when it was released in April 2005, although it took Safari 2.0.4 in early 2006 before it was stable.

Page loading was slow in 2005, when Apple’s front page took a total of over 16 seconds to load fully, but that only used 6.8 MB of memory. By contrast, today Apple’s front page only takes a couple of seconds but requires over 200 MB.

There were times when the only way ahead with these early versions of Safari was to completely reset it, emptying its cache, and even removing all passwords and AutoFill text. This is Safari 2 in 2006.

Prominent among the plugins in 2006 was the dreaded Shockwave Flash, which had only recently been taken over by Adobe when it acquired Macromedia the previous year. Details of plugins are here being displayed on an internal web page within Safari 2.

Safari 3, bundled in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in October 2007, brought the claim that it was then the fastest browser, but it was troubled by bugs and security problems at first.

Safari 3 had already grown extensive preferences, covering the use of plugins, Java, JavaScript and cookies, seen here in 2007.

Its successor, Safari 4, followed in the summer of 2009, ready for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, with further performance improvements, particularly in its JavaScript engine.

By 2009, Safari 4 was able to warn the user if it was about to visit a site blacklisted by the Google Safe Browsing Service. At least when that service was available. That year also saw Preview and Beta releases of Google Chrome, now Safari’s most serious competitor on Apple’s hardware.

Safari 5 was released a year later, in 2010, and was bundled in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011. This brought Reader mode and opened the door to third-party extensions.

Safari’s hidden Debug menu provided a collection of tools for web developers, and more recently has become the even more extensive Develop menu.

By the release of macOS 10.12 Sierra in 2016, Safari had reached version 10.

By 2016, close control over Adobe Flash Player had become critical, as a result of its frequent exploits, although it remained highly popular with content developers before Adobe finally killed it at the end of 2020.

Since 2021, with the release of macOS 12 Monterey, Safari 15 and its successors have been able to perform on-the-fly translation, as demonstrated here.

Safari is now the bundled browser in macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS, and this year is set to leap in version number from 18 to 26 with the arrival of Tahoe and its sister OSes. It has been a long and sometimes troubled journey over those 22 years, and despite strong competition from Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, it remains the browser of first choice for a great many using Apple’s hardware products. I hope my screenshots have brought back more happy memories than traumatic moments.

Reference

Wikipedia.