Good news – Apple has released macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS updates yesterday (Wednesday US time, Thursday NZ time) which included a large number of security fixes including a fix for the IndexedDB leak which has been left unfixed since November – better late than never I guess. Those updates also included firmware updates – no noticeable difference but things are going well (many times the firmware includes microcode updates which addresses issues in Intel CPUs), Safari is a lot snappier with its upgrade to Safari 15.3 (if it were purely a bug fix then I’d hazard to guess that it would have just been labelled 15.2.1 instead of bumping it up to 15.3) which probably includes improvements along side bug fixes. It appears that the bad old days of poor video playback hasn’t reared its ugly head so I’m happy with the end result.
One thing to keep in mind with Apple is that that they don’t provide an exhaustive list of all the changes they have made. What Apple lists tend to be the really big obvious changes that people will notice immediately but that isn’t to say they don’t fix up issues people report as noted in a previous post where I outlined a CSS issue that was causing problems on YouTube resulting in unreliable video playback back due to high CPU utilisation when scrolling through/loading comments section, that fix made its way into Safari without any fanfare. In this case I also notice that websites are loading quicker, less memory being used however it appears that if I am on YouTube and want to press ‘back’ to go back to the main page the main page will reload rather than going back to the previous state. What I find interesting though is how secure Apple’s own drivers are when compared to the third party ones they rely on – is that due to market penetration thus making hose drivers more prone to being hacked or is the benefit of lacking legacy has allowed Apple to write secure code from the ground up by baking those ‘secure code practices’ into them from day one.
I’m taking time off work today due to having a sore throat – depending on how I feel I might need to have the next day off. I think it is the result of ‘burning the candles at both ends’ – some rest and home cooking will help me feeling better soon.
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