Updating safari browser for mac update#

I like to paste paths and URLs like this into BBEdit’s Open File by Name window. (Old catalog URLs are listed here.) Right now, the current non-beta one is:

Updating safari browser for mac update#

Inside are URLs for the current macOS software update catalogs. But how can you find such links yourself? First, open this file: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/amework/Versions/A/Resources/ist Macintosh rescued me, providing a mysterious link to the Safari 16 installer package. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the link via Web searches, instead finding lots of SEO pages that didn’t actually offer the solution. Of course, the Safari 16 installer must be available from Apple’s servers since macOS’s software update can download it. Apple’s supported solution, I assume, is to use macOS Recovery to reinstall all of macOS ( and then update to Safari 16) or perhaps to restore from a Time Machine backup. However, Apple no longer offers downloads of the Safari installer. I had other Web browsers installed, so my first thought was to simply download the Safari 16 installer and run it again. However, Safari is updated separately from the rest of macOS, and so it is actually stored on the Data volume rather than on the SSV. You might think this should be impossible because macOS now uses a Signed System Volume (SSV) that’s supposed to make sure that the system files are correct. This had never happened to me before in all my years of using Macs.

On one of my Macs running macOS 12.6, the Safari 16 update said that it had succeeded but actually left me with a zero-byte executable that wouldn’t launch.