Watching a video about Chrome once again causing pain to end users but this time it is in the form of the updater that resides in the background but resulting in high CPU utilisation by WindowServer. Rather than this being an example of a bug, I feel it is an example of a much larger issue at play which goes right back to when Google decided to take webkit in a different direction with the forking of the code thus creating the ‘Blink’ browsing engine which sits at the heart of Chrome.

It comes down to two areas where webkit and blink diverge. The first being that although Chrome was the first to deliver a multiprocess model that was delivered via ‘bruit force’ when compared to Webkit2 which bought the multiprocess model to the Webkit platform (link). The net result of the design differences translates to a browser that is light weight whose memory usage doesn’t go through the roof the more tabs that are open.

The second area is the differences in developing their code base, from the outside it appears that Google has a ‘add features now, sort out the lack of optimisation later’ where as with Apple, there are constant benchmarks after each nightly compile to check whether there not only have been compatibility regressions but also ensure there have been no performance regressions. Although Apple hasn’t added as many HTML5 features as Google the upswing is that when they are added they don’t bloat Safari meaning that features are added but there is no (or not noticeable) performance hit.

Back to how things are going in my life – I’m 90% of the way there getting holiday presents sorted for my nieces with now the only thing left to do is wait for the desert to he delivered on Tuesday next week and once that arrives I’ll buy some alcohol for the BBQ and get together with family. The eldest one is easy to buy for, the youngest is also easy to buy for but the middle one – there is a reason why I prefer being the ‘cool single uncle’, once the middle one gets old enough then I’ll start giving vouchers.

One thing that I wasn’t expecting this morning was the release of updates from Apple – iOS 14.3 (which updated the modem firmware from 1.14.06 to 1.31.03-05 with the Spark carrier settings updated from 44.0 to 45.0. So far things have been very reliable. When it came to macOS and tvOS (along with iOS) I did a clean install and everything is very robust.