Signed software. Not approved software. Mac apps can be installed after being downloaded from the web.

And as if Apple would ever block/pull/disapprove the world’s most popular browser.

Aren't they actually blocking alternative browser engines on IOS still?

Yes

not in the EU

also in the EU

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.

Love this

Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.

Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.

Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.

Tragic

If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.

There's also Epiphany web browser for cross-platform desktop support and the Fulguris browser for Android.

It is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.

Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?

I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.

Chrome is the most advanced browsers on each platform. For example I have hundreds of tabs And chrome is the best at saving up RAM in the backgrouns

It's just closing the older tabs and re-rendering them from cache, when returned to. WebKit does the same thing.

Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.

It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with

It's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.

> It's not really using it for much text, though.

That's exactly the opposite of my perception—for instance, it's been used to render help/support databases on my Mac for at least twenty years.

Is that why settings search has been broken for years across iOS and macOS?

Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.

But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.

Isn't Slack just mIRC with a skin? /s

I occasionally port software I make to MacOS, while mainly being a Linux user, and I settled on a base model, 8 GB M2 Mac Mini for this as well. If it's zippy there, it'll be zippy on the larger models.

On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.

The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)

Meanwhile GitHub tab in Firefox/Chrome eats 6GB RAM alone.

because they decided that running elasticsearch on your machine is a great idea!

GitHub, GitHub…where else have I seen that name recently?

Yep. For me it was a perfect gift to replace moms 10+ year old Intel based MacBook Air.

Source?

Abusive in what way?

Locking accounts and running away with the money; often tens or hundreds of thousands.

How did it get worse?

The art on this website is awesome. The Draad series especially

I'll never understand why people insist on using web based email.

Just install your favorite desktop + mobile mail apps and you're fine.

If that can't be done with Protonmail, and you want to move your email out of the US, suggest FastMail, based in Australia.

Searching email in local mailbox is a constant problem for me.

Nothing really support IMAP search.

Every mua sucks at large mbox file.

-- Edit: I am a happy fastmail user

FWIW I use Apple's default Mail apps w/ FastMail IMAP and don't have issues with search.

But I guess you mean search w/o local caching

Thunderbird's search works just fine for me with tens of thousands of mails.

It can be done with proton, or at least it used to be possible (Not sure, didn't check in a while) thanks to their bridge. A small local software you'd run that decrypt everything and provides a local imap server with the decrypted content

Reader mode works