Safari 18.2 enables WebGPU by default

[controversial]

On devices running iOS 18.2 beta and macOS Sonoma 15.2 beta, WebGPU is marked as “stable” within Feature Flags, and is enabled by default [1]

However, I haven’t seen an official announcement of this and it’s not included in the release notes for Safari 18.2—maybe @jensimmons can confirm this change?

[controversial]

See also #7093, #7127

[jensimmons]

We’d love for people to test Web GPU, and provide feedback at http://feedbackassistant.apple.com.

It might be a bit early for it to appear on Can I Use, since it's not listed in release notes. Let me get back to you on that. Thanks for asking.

[controversial]

Thanks for the response Jen!

I proposed the change here because WebGPU is enabled by default in stable Safari (i.e. not TP) on my devices running 15.2/18.2, and this wasn’t true on previous macOS/iOS versions.

Looking forward to hearing back; I’m very excited for WebGPU to land in Safari!

[jensimmons]

Safari 18.2 beta 4 came out today. If you test in a more recent beta, you'll see that WebGPU is off by default.

[jensimmons]

I’ll say again… WebGPU can be enabled with the feature flag. To anyone who reading this who is interested, please do test it out! File any issues you find at bugs.webkit.org. (where you can now log in using your GitHub account) and help us ensure it’s awesome.

[controversial]

Thanks Jen! Any word you can share on how close Safari is to shipping WebGPU? It seems like it's in pretty good shape, from my perspective—and the benefits to the web platform will be huge, even if there’s more work to be done on optimizing performance and some bugs.

[jensimmons]

I don't have an answer about when. It is close, but we want to make sure it's ready before shipping.