Matisyahu's Blog

Apple has released updates for all its platforms today (link), I’ve updated all my devices and things are working very smoothly. The updates include a very long list of security updates (link) along with some pretty major improvements to Webkit (link) that float through to big improvements to Safari. On tvOS I’ve found that the responsiveness has improved massively where as with the previous version of tvOS I would use my remote and find that it would be unresponsive then suddenly all those times I pressed the remote suddenly come through all at once. I also found that under the previous version that the YouTube would just hand and be unresponsive then either it would wake back up or would exit back to the main Home Screen. All the issues outlined have appeared to be resolved – fast and fluid experience.

macOS 15.4 has included quite a few under the hood changes – looking through the Extensions in System Profile it appears that almost every part of the operating system has been touched, the firmware for the wifi chip has been updated along with the 802.11 DriverKit also has been updated, FS Kit (user land file system API) has been stabilised and ready for developers to use which hopefully may result in FUSE drivers being made available on macOS in user space. Safari is pretty responsive and there aren’t any issues with the browser extensions so far. iOS has updated the modem firmware on my iPhone 15 Pro Max from 2.40.x to 2.52.3. Like macOS the overall ‘feel’ in terms of responsiveness has improved – I have no empirical evidence other than just how it ‘feels’ when using the device.

I focus a lot of attention on Webkit primarily because these days we spend so much of our time on the internet with the web browser pretty much becoming the ‘run time engine’ for the internet in much the same way that in the past .NET and Java were a period of time seen as the future of development. Even on iOS and Android you’ll find that almost every application makes use of WebView2 or Webkit to render large parts of their app or reply on web based frameworks – a good example of that would be mobile banking apps that use a mixture of native and web based technologies. Native applications are slowly dying particularly when it comes to enterprise productivity – where I work we do everything through Office 365 through the web browser, Google’s whole portfolio is all web based, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are either providing turn key solutions (complete products provided individually or part of a ‘suite’ of applications) or frameworks that allow businesses to build bespoke applications which are all accessed through the the web browser.