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On OSX: After an update to El Capitan, I found that Safari 9 was installed by default. For software testing purposes, I need to test a web app through Safari 8 (which is still the latest version in Yosemite). I searched but there is no way (expect for browserstack) to install or emulate an older version of Safari.

Other than downgrading to Yosemite, is there a way to do it?

Moncefmd
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Probably the closest you could get is by downloading one of the WebKit nightlies that matches up with your desired Safari version.

Wikipedia's Safari version history article lists the corresponding WebKit version for each Safari release. If you then look up the tag for that version in the WebKit source, you can find a corresponding revision number. Finally, you can use the WebKit Nightly Archives to download the closest nightly build.

Safari 8.0.7 used WebKit version 600.7.12, which seems to most closely correspond to WebKit build r185729.

I don't know if you can run more than one WebKit build on a machine, but you could run at least one older version to target, in addition to Safari.

robmathers
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  • Hey thank you very much for this smart way. Unfortunately you can't get Safari 6 to work on El Capitan since it's my clients browser and he has problems with svgs. But anyway, here comes my upvote – moeses Jun 24 '16 at 10:39
  • Glad that helped a little at least. Out of curiosity, what happened when you tried? – robmathers Jun 24 '16 at 23:36
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    I guess the app was too old for El Capitan. On launch an error-message appeared "this webkit […] is not compatible with 10.11". Now i wanna know if there is any possible solution for testing a webapp in older safari-browser – moeses Jun 27 '16 at 07:37
  • You could try recompiling from source, rather than just downloading the binaries. However there's no guarantee that would work given the integration between WebKit and OS X. Your next best option may be running an older OS X version in a VM. – robmathers Jun 27 '16 at 19:55
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    Unfortunately the link to the WebKit Nightly Archives link no longer works (https://webkit.org/nightly/archives/) and I have not managed to find a replacement for finding old builds on webkit.org. – salomvary Mar 18 '19 at 15:52
  • Looks like the new site is at: https://webkit.org/build-archives/ ... but it only shows links for the 30 most recent builds. :-/ – markquezada Aug 09 '20 at 07:51
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I also searched for getting older Safari Versions and found a website which offers them for download.

They are too old for my Version of OSX so I was not able to test it - but maybe it works for someone.

http://www.oldapps.com/mac/de/safari.php

Andybanandy
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    The website you linked currently lists Safari 5.1.1 as the latest release (7 years ago) so I would assume this is no longer updated. Additionally, just for info, the English version of the page you linked is: http://www.oldapps.com/mac/safari.php – James Cushing Aug 16 '18 at 11:32
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Following up on @robmathers's answer, the nightly builds are no longer listed publicly on webkit.org. However, they are still available in the S3 bucket storing them, which you can access via the AWS CLI.

Looking at the trac.webkit.org result, select a reasonable release version prefix for the build you're looking for (say 3 or 4 of the 6 digits), then use the following:

aws s3 ls minified-archives.webkit.org/mac-mojave-x86_64-release/2425 --no-sign-request

This will show you the available builds. You can then download via https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/minified-archives.webkit.org/mac-mojave-x86_64-release/<release_version>.zip.

Oleg Vaskevich
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  • Just to follow up on this: I actually wasn't able to find the older version that I wanted using this method. Instead, I ended up setting up the appropriate older version of macOS in a VM, which came bundled with the older version of Safari that I wanted. – Oleg Vaskevich Jan 31 '21 at 21:21