Spotify no longer streams music in Apple’s Safari web browser
If you use Safari to stream Spotify tunes, you’re going to need a plan B. Listeners have discovered that Spotify’s web player no longer works with Safari. Visit and you’ll be asked to either use an alternative browser or fire up the native Mac app. When asked about the abrupt change, the company’s customer support could only say that “recent updates” made Safari incompatible. It can’t say if or when the feature will come back. We’ve asked Spotify if it can elaborate, but there’s already some speculation as to the possible cause.
Mac Generation suspects that the decision might have something to do with the Widevine copy protection plugin. Spotify wants to use that for web-based music streaming, but macOS may flag it over concerns that its security isn’t sufficiently airtight. And without reliable access to Widevine, Spotify can’t guarantee that Safari will play properly even if it’s technically possible.
This isn’t likely to be a huge issue on the Mac, since it doesn’t take much to fire up another app. However, this could be a headache if you use a Mac at work and aren’t allowed to install your own software. Also, it illustrates one of the perils of copy protection on the web: it turns an ostensibly universal platform into a proprietary one where you have to support a given company’s add-ons to get the full experience.
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