Spotify’s web player no longer works on Safari on the Mac due to apparent security concern

Spotify’s web player no longer supports Safari. Attempting to use the web player leads to the above message, prompting Mac users to use the desktop app instead …

French site MacG noticed the issue over the weekend, which appears to be due to an incompatibility issue with the Widevine Digital Rights Management system used by Spotify.

Spotify itself doesn’t explicitly mention the problem in its support document, but Safari is notable by its absence in the updated list of compatible browsers.

The web player is supported by the following web browsers:

Chrome 45+
Firefox 47+
Edge 14+
Opera 32+

Spotify content may only be accessed with the Spotify app, the web player website, or apps otherwise authorized by Spotify.

One comment on Spotify’s support forum suggests that Apple chooses not to support the current version of the Widevine plug-in due to security concerns.

Apparently it has something to do with the Widevine content decryption module, which Apple doesn’t support because it’s not very secure.

When they attempted to manually add the plugin, they got the message shown below.

Neither Spotify nor Apple had responded to MacG‘s request for comment at the time of writing.