As part of my work I use both Chrome and Safari – Chrome integrates into the Google Workspace that my workplace utilises and Safari I use when loading personal websites. There are lots of little things that accumulate such as Mastodon works better with Chrome and Firefox – Safari keeps complaining about ‘This Webpage is using Significant Memory in Safari’ but this occurs on both computers with the first having 24GB RAM and the other having 32GB RAM so it isn’t as though they’re lacking in the memory department. There is also lingering PWA issues not resolved such as updating in the background as new posts come in result in moving to a different tab then coming back 1/2 later to find that it hasn’t updated or at the very least updated but remaining in the same position on the time line so you don’t lose track of where you were when reading.

It’ll be interesting to see whether more resources will be put into Webkit to accelerate not only development but merging those Webkit changes into the mainstream build of Safari in a must more prompt manner to ensure that bugs that appear are fixed quickly and when new standards developed that first question is “is this good for our customers’ rather than ‘does this impact our App Store sales if we make the PWA experience for end users really good’.

The web browser of today has become the ‘run time engine’ for the internet where as in the past there was Java, .NET, Flash, Shockwave, Adobe Air etc. but all of those have been replaced with open standards based technologies that run within a web browser. It is interesting that for years Microsoft fought tooth and nail against such a transition because it feared that it would undermine the market dominance of Windows until Microsoft had a robust cloud offering then combine that with bringing their middleware and productivity to the cloud (along with building up their own hardware division) the concerns about Windows market dominance disappeared along with concerns about having an in-house browser in favour of utilising Chromium not to mention the exiting from the mobile operating system market.

What I hope is that eventually Apple gets over it’s fixation of ‘protect the App Store at all costs’ in much the same way that Microsoft got over its ‘protect Windows at all cost’ fixation because there are so many more avenues they could generate new revenue. What other avenues? create an iCloud ‘business’, maybe focus on creating a ‘fleet’ computer based on Mac mini, improved management tools, longer support life cycles to allow a much more gradual transition when upgrading to a new version of macOS, iOS etc. I’m sure there are many, many more options Apple have if they really needed new business opportunities.

On my Mastodon feed I posted that I had upgraded from an iPhone 12 Pro Max to a Nothing Phone (1) (256GB storage, 12GB RAM) and moved to a Chromecast with Google TV (upgraded to Android TV 12 ) but I’ll be writing a review of both devices once I have had some more experience using them. Regarding Google Workspace, they really have streamlined the ease of setting it up if you have a WordPress account – it is just a matter of authorising Google to chat with WordPress meaning all the DNS settings and other stuff are all taken care of rather than having to manually configure.

A couple of thing to remember is that when you setup a Workspace account you’ll need to make at least a deposit into your Workspace of account of US$30 or more then wait up to 72 hours for you to be able to access YouTube (assuming you don’t want to wait 30 days (link)). The only downside is that I had to manually add all my subscriptions to the new account – I wish there was some sort of way to download something like an XML file then upload it so then the subscriptions can be added. The other one is that if you have a Nothing Phone, Pixel or any phone that includes Google Discover then you’ll need to enable ‘Additional Google services’ (link).