Google changed something this week that most New Zealand business owners will never notice and the people who build their websites cannot ignore. On 8 September it released Chrome 153, the first version of the browser on a new two-week release cycle. Since 2021 Chrome has shipped a new version every four weeks. From now on a new stable version, and a new beta, will arrive every fortnight on desktop computers, Android and iOS.
Apple follows on Monday. It has set 14 September as the release date for iOS 27, which carries Safari 27. When the WebKit team previewed the Safari 27 beta in June, it counted 58 new features and 525 fixes, which it described as “the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in recent memory”.
Two browser updates in one week is not unusual on its own. What has changed is the pace. For anyone who still treats a website as a project that ends on launch day, the pace is the problem.
Google’s case for the change is reasonable. In the announcement it published in March, it said the aim is to give developers and users “immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities”, and argued that smaller, more frequent releases will be less disruptive and easier to debug. Security patches already arrive weekly, a practice Google began in 2023. Businesses that manage staff computers can stay on Chrome’s Extended Stable channel, which keeps its eight-week cycle.
Chrome 153 itself mostly adds things. Its release notes list new CSS for controlling how people scroll, a new way to join text together in JavaScript, and a safer XML parser written in the Rust programming language. None of that should trouble an ordinary business website built to web standards.
Things do get removed, though, and the next removal is already scheduled. Chrome will stop supporting XSLT from version 158 on 17 November. XSLT is a 1990s technology for turning raw XML data into a readable web page, and Google’s engineers say the code behind it has become a security risk. The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated they plan to remove it.
That sounds obscure, and it is, but it sits closer to ordinary websites than you might expect. Google’s own guidance notes that many RSS and Atom news feeds use XSLT to make themselves readable when someone opens them in a browser. WordPress’s built-in XML sitemap, the file that lists a site’s pages, points to an XSL stylesheet for the same reason. The list of pages inside the sitemap does not change. What changes is what a person sees when they open it, on a website nobody has touched. That is the shape browser changes tend to take for a business, a small surprise on a site that was working fine last month.
In New Zealand, the Apple half of this week matters more than it does globally. StatCounter’s figures for August put Chrome at 56.7 per cent of New Zealand web browsing across all devices and Safari at 23.8 per cent. Worldwide the figures were 69.3 and 15.9 per cent. Safari’s New Zealand share has stayed above 21 per cent every month for the past year.
On phones the difference is bigger. iPhones accounted for 55.8 per cent of mobile browsing in New Zealand in August, against 32.5 per cent worldwide, and on New Zealand phones Safari ran almost level with Chrome, at 44.5 per cent to 45.9 per cent.
Safari’s share understates Apple’s reach, though. Apple’s App Store rules require apps that browse the web to use its WebKit engine, with exceptions only in the European Union and Japan. Chrome on an iPhone in New Zealand draws web pages with Apple’s engine, not Google’s. When a New Zealander installs iOS 27, it updates the engine behind every browser on that phone. A business that checks its site only in Chrome on an office computer is not seeing what, nationally, more than half of mobile visitors see.
There is good news in Safari 27 too, and designers have waited a long time for it. The humble drop-down menu, the select box on booking forms and checkouts, has been one of the hardest parts of a website to make look right. Making it match a brand has usually meant rebuilding it in JavaScript, and those rebuilt versions risk losing the keyboard and screen reader support the built-in control provides. Safari 27 supports the new customisable select, which WebKit says lets developers build a drop-down that matches a site “without reaching for a JavaScript library or sacrificing the accessibility, reliability, and native platform integration of a real HTML form control.”
Chrome has supported the same feature since version 135 in 2025. Once Apple devices update, it will work in the browsers behind roughly four in five page views in New Zealand. Older browsers simply fall back to the ordinary drop-down, so there is little risk in using it. For a lot of sites that means one less script to load, and one less piece of custom code to go wrong when the next update lands.
What should a business owner actually do? Not panic. Most sites will get through both updates without anyone noticing. But I would ask whoever looks after your website three plain questions.
First, do they test against Chrome’s beta? Google now ships each beta about three weeks before the stable release, and its announcement recommends that developers “test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications.” A developer who does that will see a problem before your customers do.
Second, will they check the site on an iPhone running iOS 27 next week? Not just the home page, but the parts that earn money, such as the enquiry form, the booking calendar and the checkout. Given how many New Zealanders browse on iPhones, a broken form there would reach a lot of customers.
Third, does anything on the site rely on technology the browsers are retiring? For most sites the answer will be no, or a cosmetic yes, like the sitemap. It is still worth asking before 17 November rather than after.
It is also worth opening your own analytics and looking at which browsers your customers actually use. National figures are a guide. Your own visitors are the ones who matter, and your share of iPhone visitors may sit well above or below the national figure.
Chrome 154 is due on 22 September, and another version will follow a fortnight after that. None of it will be dramatic, and that is really the point. The web now changes in small steps all the time, and the websites that cope best are the ones someone is still looking after.
Roger McSaveney is General Manager of Forge Creative, an Auckland web design and development agency.
Has a browser or phone update ever broken something on your website? Tell us what happened in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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