Matisyahu's Blog

Well, I decided not to get up early today and instead sleep in until 11am – woke up, had a relaxing brunch and then checked out to see what was happening, what the masses were thinking of the new platforms given that I avoided the public beta versions due to preferring to keep a stable computing environment. All the devices I did a clean install – I adopted the rule many years ago that when installing a major release to always do a clean install so that if there are issues then you’ve taken out the variable that could contribute to issues appearing that might not otherwise appear on a clean install.

Safari 18 has a good number of improvements as outlined in an article on Webkit (link) shows that Apple is working hard on closing the gap between Safari/Webkit and the competition. One thing to keep in mind is their continuous benchmarking to ensure that new feature or functionality being added does not result in a decrease in performance. My experience so far with Safari 18 has been pretty good – I’ve got AdGuard extension installed there are no issues however there appears to be an incompatibility issue with the Authenticator Safari Extension which crashes the Authenticator app itself so I’ve disabled it until they get it fixed.

One of the bugs they have fixed up is in the ‘System Information’ in the Extensions area where they’ve fixed it up so that information about extensions are shown rather than throwing an error message as with the case of macOS 14. What I also find interesting is an increase in the number of user space drivers that make use of the DriveKit framework, the use of FSKit to run exFAT and FAT support in user space rather than as a kernel extension and greater user of I/O Kit. All of that feeds into the larger goal of closing off the kernel to third parties so that only the absolute core essentials are running in kernel space while pushing everything that doesn’t need to run in kernel space to be pushed out into user space.

I’ve noticed that it is slightly more snappy in terms of responsiveness, everything feels more optimised, lower CPU utilisation when playing back videos, booting up was a bit faster, etc. so I think that is the evolution of under the hood changes along with improvements with the Clang and LLVM compiler resulting in more optimised code that runs better on Apple’s ARM based processors. It’ll be interested to see how long Apple will be supporting Intel based Macs.

Arstechnica has put up a lengthy review of macOS 15 (link) which goes into a lot more detail than I have – yeah, I could write something up myself but Arstechnica does a lot better job at getting into the nitty gritty details that make for an interesting ready.