Matisyahu's Blog

Apple has released a bevy of updates, on macOS the firmware was updated from 8422.121.1 to 8422.141.2 and the firmware/driver for wifi from updated from 20.96.28.1.8.7.146 to 20.96.31.0.8.7.148, I haven’t noticed any difference in terms of speed but equally I haven’t noticed any regressions. Safari has also been updated to 16.6 however I am still sticking with Chrome for the time being but I’ll reevaluate that when macOS 14 is released so I can see how Safari 17 has turned out but that very much depends on where Apple is when it comes to supporting the Webextensions API.

When it comes to Webextensions API, there has been continued discussion regarding declarativeNetRequest (link) – making filter lists more efficient where wildcards can be used for blocking domains rather than declaring them individually and thus hitting filter limitations. That being said, based on the implementation in browsers it appears that Safari is lagging behind the competition (link) which makes me cynical about whether Apple truly believes in Webextensions API or whether they’re only doing the absolute bare minimum that they can get way with. There are great content blockers such as AdGuard (which I would recommend if you must use Safari) but ultimately the quality of the blocking is very much dictated by the quality of the Webextensions API implementation.

Chrome 115 was released – there is a long slow march towards phasing out third party cookies and other nasties in favour of having an assortment of technologies that Google believe will keep the advertisers and website owners happy. Personally they should have just say down with Apple and adopt what Apple was proposing and have continued developing rather than what is being pushed is yet another set of APIs that’ll require developers to open into using. Oh, and from the “really, you thought that was a good idea” comes this gem (link).

For me at the moment I am using Safari after giving Chrome and Firefox a try – Firefox has come a long way but there are still corner cases where there is website incompatibility not to mention lagging behind on web standards (link). The situation reminds me very much of Microsoft Edge (the one before the Chromium based Microsoft Edge) where, according to their telemetry data, people would give the browser a chance until they hit an incompatible website at which point they download Chrome and never look back. Yes, not all compatibility issues are due to the browser itself but for the average user they don’t care whether it’s the website or the browser they just want to visit the website they’re interested in and let either side sort out any problems that may exist behind the scenes.

Just to wrap things up, I find my self watching not as much content as I used to – part of it due to the writers strike resulting in fewer shows available to watch but equally it has kind of gotten to the point that I’ve watched so many variations of a given theme that I know who did what and where within the first 5 minutes of the show. I guess in a wordy way I am saying that the shows have become repetitive and thus no longer hold my interest as they once did. These days I’m more into watching news, documentaries and video essays these days – a lot of great content on YouTube as long as you’re willing to train the algorithm so that it doesn’t suggest garbage.