Matisyahu's Blog

Woke up today and checked email before getting up then checked my software was up to date and to my surprise Apple has released updates for all their platforms as well as Firefox 122 being made available on their server so I updated them both. Looking into a bit of detail for the macOS 14.3 update it appears that Apple is moving more of their drivers into user space particularly those that are making use of USB such as USB to Ethernet adapters. I think long term what we’re going to see is that when Intel based Macs are deprecated that going forward the requirement will be that all drivers will have to be user space drivers.

As a side note, with the release of the Mac Pro, there is nothing stopping nVidia from providing a CUDA accelerator card for the Mac Pro and create user space drivers but I have a feeling that going forward we’re going to see more work being pushed into the cloud where you ‘rent’ time using hardware rather than having go out to purchase hardware that you may use infrequently (thus making it a difficult purchase to justify). All this makes me wonder whether the Mac Pro is going to be around for the long term or will the eventual future Mac for ‘serious people’ will be the Mac Studio.

Firefox 122 was released so I updated it – it is amazing how far Firefox has come because now at the point at least for me it is faster than Chrome on both of my Macs (still waiting for Firefox 122 to come through for Android). The only extension I have installed is uBlock Origin which is working great on all my devices and no bugs have appeared when testing out all the websites I use on a regular basis except for the Skype web interface which I’ve reported (apparently if you change the user agent to Safari it works so it definitely isn’t a situation of Firefox 122 missing functionality) because it comes up with a message that functionality is missing when using Firefox and that I should use Microsoft Edge (I’m open to the idea as so long as Microsoft decides not to get rid of MV2 support but so far they’ve announced they’re in lock step with Google).