its all the discussion regarding Manifest V3 I find it refreshing to see that there are developers bringing to the forefront one of the biggest complains regarding the move to Manifest V3 which is one of the big sticking points for content blockers (link). Alexi made a great point in the most recent minutes where he noted the following:
[alexei] Browser vendors seem to have the mistaken belief that they can enumerate all use cases and include that in the design of DNR. Privacy and security extensions need to continue to be able to respond quickly to evolving tracker techniques, which a declarative API inherently does not support. Additionally, when browser vendors talk about improving performance with DNR, these concerns go against real world experience where webRequest-based extensions already make browsing faster and more performant. Browser vendor performance improvement claims seem like solving for the wrong problem.
This taps into what the developer of uBlock Origin pointed out, that the strength of their software comes from the ability to have very low level access and without that low level access the power that uBlock Origin has is diminished and so will the end result of blocking content. I really do hope that the browser developers listen rather than being pig headed and simply pushing ahead even when it is clear that it is going to negatively impact millions of end users.
I mentioned on my last post that I had moved over to Google Workspace as a trial (the post yesterday was after almost 2 weeks) and although in some areas it is an improvement I am still drawn back to iCloud because even for all its faults the leading benefit is its integration with macOS, iOS and tvOS. It’ll be interesting to see how things improve particularly in the area of Webkit given the recent announcements regarding features that’ll make their way into the mainstream release such as ‘The File System Access API with Origin Private File System’ (link) not to mention the many features that’ll eventually be back ported to Safari (link).
The other big surprise is Ad Guard has been updated (link) with the latest beta builds now taking advantage of the increase in the number of filter rules it can deal with (upgraded from 50K to 150K) along with other improvements. It is good to see that they’re updating but it would be even better if more developers got involved with the Manifest V3 development process because at the moment there is only Ghostery and Noscript representing what one could consider ‘content blocking’ developers. If you are a developer and are unhappy with the direction then the best suggestion I can give is to get involved – turn up to the meeting and contribute as to ensure that your concerns are listened to rather than, “I’ve given up on Chrome so I’ll jut focus on Firefox from now on”. Here is a moment that’ll help shape the direction for all browsers – sign up and get involved.
Well, I’ve decided to move from iCloud to Google Workspace for my custom domain for a number of reasons. The first is the 3 email address limitation is far too low, I understand the potential reasoning behind it but it has become an impediment since I like to have cohorts of email addresses used for specific purposes – one for shopping, one for bills etc. The other benefit is that GOogle Drive is a whole lot more reliable when it comes to uploading large files. I went with Google Workspace Business Standard which is NZ$18 per month which is only $1 more than going for the 2TB option for iCloud storage with the added bonus of being able to create up to 30 email aliases vs the limit of 3 on iCloud+.
Another thing I noticed is that Gmail, even when using Mimestream, is a lot more reliable – when I click to select which alias I am going to send from I find that with iCloud it either works or it does then in which case I have to log out of iCloud then log back in (via System Settings) and hopefully will start working. When it comes to Google, everything works properly the first time everytime. Yes, even using the GMail app on iOS works more reliably.
Google has released Android 13 Developer Preview, so far there hasn’t been any big changes but from what has been going around the rumour mill it appears that this release is about tidying up loose ends, improving privacy and security etc. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the various OEM’s adopt it but I have a feeling that we’ll probably see Samsung being one of the first out of the gate which will be nice – 4 years of upgrades and 5 years of security updates. That improvement in long term support might see them win some more contracts with enterprise customers which has been quite a fertile ground for Apple to make a lot of its sales to due to its long period of support.
It is interesting to see the wheels in motion when it comes to dealing with the big technology companies particularly in the area of app stores. I’m going out on a limb to speculate that Google will probably avoid the worst of it since they already allow people to ‘opt in’ to be able to side load but I don’t think they’ll go unscatched – they’ll probably demand that developers can go through third party payment solutions, maybe cap the percentage that the app store take as a cut. Regarding Apple, they could easily allow side loading and keep it relatively secure using notarisation like they use on macOS – put it behind some sort of setting where you have to enter your pin; agree to a warning then get an activation code sent to the phone that is entered which confirms you wish to go ahead.
Samsung is having their Unpacked today (at the time of typing this I have the video playing in the background):
It appears that some of the rumours are paying off – they’ve consolidated the Note and Ultra line into a single product which will mean the Ultra will include an S-Pen. It makes sense given that Ultra was essentially a Note but without an S-Pen. Then is the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra – they’ve really leaned into the tablet, particularly when it comes to DeX mode (which teamed up with the Samsung equivalent of a ‘Smart Cover’) which turns it into a full on convertible laptop – based on the video demonstration it will definitely give Apple a run for their money particularly when you consider the expandability, memory and not to mention the long term software support (which was lacking in the past).
They’ve announced that the Google Assistant will be coming to the Galaxy Watch 4 which makes me wonder whether we’re going to see Samsung gradually move away from Bixby in favour of moving to Google Assistant over the long term.
Samsung has also made an interesting shot across the bow to Apple when it comes to talking about balancing security with openness, focusing on privacy not just being able what is and isn’t shared but also when something is shared that it is kept secure. Keeping in mind that this is based off the Unpacked presentation but it is interesting that it was raised – as a point of differentiation where I think that Samsung is hoping that it might win over some Apple users but I think the greater focus is winning over users from other Android OEMs. At the moment the impression I get from Samsung is that they’re trying to win the ‘bang for your buck’ – privacy, security and long term software support. If they cannot compete on price when compared to the Oppo and Xiaomi then it appears they’ll argue the case that paying a little bit extra is worth the price in the long run.
Something else I noticed is the lack of specifications when it comes to the SoC – no details given other than it being very fast and using the latest 4nm technology but nothing mentioned about which markets will receive the Exynos 2200 or the Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 (there have been rumours that Samsung will be going with Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 globally but I guess it’ll be a situation of ‘wait and see’ given how regularly rumours can be wrong). They are offering a $500 online eVoucher and 5% Samsung Rewards, I’ll hold off from making any judgements until they come out with the specifications of the SoC. The other thing that’ll be interesting is the software given that Samsung sometimes introduces changes when they introduce new hardware – it’ll be interesting to see whether there will be fewer apps of their own that use their own cloud offerings vs. utilising Microsoft’s or Google’s cloud services.
Edit: Spark has updated their website and according to the website the phone range use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 for their entire range in New Zealand – it includes a new modem, all manufactured on their latest fabrication (4nm).
Google has released Chrome 98 (link) and so far everything is stable on macOS – a fair number of security bugs have been fixed. On the topic of Safari though, just when you thought that the issue of IndexedDB had been resolved (the security issue) it appears to have reared its ugly head with reports that the fix may have broken compatibility with websites.
Web developers, are you currently experiencing any Storage bugs (IndexDB, others) with Safari 15.3 or 15.4?
Apple really do need to stop treating Webkit/Safari as some sort of tickbox “yeah, we have a browser” and actually dedicate the people power to bring it up to the same support for open standards as Firefox and Chrome. Yes, in a perfect world people would write their apps in native code because native code gives the best experience for the end user but unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world, we live in this world and part of that involves accepting the world as it exists and work to make it suck slightly less. Electron applications are never going away (infact, all evidence so far shows that its use is expanding) so at the very least Apple should focus on getting Webkit to a point where it can be a drop in replacement for Chromium so that when developers do use Electron on macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc. that it takes advantage of the heavily optimised Webkit rather than hauling a whole web engine everywhere the app goes.
I tried to give Safari a try, I really did but I’m back using Chrome once again – if it isn’t content blockers that break websites (I only enable the non-problematic filters) it is Safari not working properly with the websites I use such as the Affinity payroll (the website doesn’t work properly, for example, viewing ones payslip for the week), Sammobile doesn’t work properly with Ad Guard but works properly with Chrome running uBlock Origin. On a good side, Chrome is working smoother on macOS 12.2 than it did on 12.1 so I wonder whether the ‘memory leaks’ that have done the rounds on social media are gradually being fixed which will result in a better experience for not only Apple’s own first party apps but also third party apps as well.
I’ve been keeping track of the official Samsung S22 announcement which will be in the next week or so with many rumours still circulating regarding whether Samsung will ship Snapdragon based phones beyond the United States, Canada, China and Japan market where the S21 Snapdragon was being sold in. In GSM Arena (link) they’re recirculating the rumour which is based on the analyse of the firmware that is in development.
The existence of clues within firmware can mean a lot of things including the possibility that it means nothing at all – just like the much rumoured ‘last Intel Mac’ based on people looking through beta updates to macOS. Many times people find a mention of something but end up making the mistake that it means something when in reality it doesn’t mean anything particularly if it is third party code which will include code in the driver for not only the hardware in the device shipping but other devices the drive supports since the driver is based on a set of code that is shared across multiple platforms. Long story short – wait for the official announcement and for goodness sake don’t label leaks as definitive statements as some YouTubers do.
Regarding Google Podcasts – still using on my iPhone and Mac because the Apple podcast app is just a giant mess given that nothing synchronises from the desktop version of the app to the cloud so then those changes are reflected on the iOS version. For example, marking all the unplayed podcasts for a particular show as ‘played’ but that is never reflected on iOS. The other issue, re-install macOS, open up the podcast app, ‘automatic downloads’ is enabled by default and if you disable it then the app will still keep downloading the podcasts even after telling it not to. I mean, come on, something that basic should be something that will take a whole 5 minutes to fix up the code and yet it has been a bug ever since the podcast app was made available on macOS.
Good news – Apple has released macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS updates yesterday (Wednesday US time, Thursday NZ time) which included a large number of security fixes including a fix for the IndexedDB leak which has been left unfixed since November – better late than never I guess. Those updates also included firmware updates – no noticeable difference but things are going well (many times the firmware includes microcode updates which addresses issues in Intel CPUs), Safari is a lot snappier with its upgrade to Safari 15.3 (if it were purely a bug fix then I’d hazard to guess that it would have just been labelled 15.2.1 instead of bumping it up to 15.3) which probably includes improvements along side bug fixes. It appears that the bad old days of poor video playback hasn’t reared its ugly head so I’m happy with the end result.
One thing to keep in mind with Apple is that that they don’t provide an exhaustive list of all the changes they have made. What Apple lists tend to be the really big obvious changes that people will notice immediately but that isn’t to say they don’t fix up issues people report as noted in a previous post where I outlined a CSS issue that was causing problems on YouTube resulting in unreliable video playback back due to high CPU utilisation when scrolling through/loading comments section, that fix made its way into Safari without any fanfare. In this case I also notice that websites are loading quicker, less memory being used however it appears that if I am on YouTube and want to press ‘back’ to go back to the main page the main page will reload rather than going back to the previous state. What I find interesting though is how secure Apple’s own drivers are when compared to the third party ones they rely on – is that due to market penetration thus making hose drivers more prone to being hacked or is the benefit of lacking legacy has allowed Apple to write secure code from the ground up by baking those ‘secure code practices’ into them from day one.
I’m taking time off work today due to having a sore throat – depending on how I feel I might need to have the next day off. I think it is the result of ‘burning the candles at both ends’ – some rest and home cooking will help me feeling better soon.
After Exynos 2200 disappeared from their website it suddenly appeared with an accompanied press release (link) followed by the Twitterverse and Reddit subreddits speculating over why it disappeared then reappeared, why there is no longer the clock rates stated on the specifications page etc. My speculation when it first occurred was that it was going to rebranded to make it stand out from previous Exynos – they appeared to have rebranded slightly with the emphasis being put on the GPU. The other speculation I’ll throw out there is that Samsung is de-emphasising the clock speed in favour of the ‘complete experience’ in much the same way that Apple themselves don’t give out specification of SoC clock speed etc. for their iPhone. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing a lot less focus on specifications in the announcement and more on what can be done when compared to previous generations.
It’ll be interesting to also see what the Android 12 build will be like given that as part of “Project Mainline” that optional components that can be updated by Google directly will now be mandatory to new phones running Android 12 along with moving away from the current fiasco of having forks of forks of forks then trying to juggle the security patches as they’re backported. If the end result is the full embracing of GKI 2.0 (generic kernel image) (link) then it should ao make life a lot easier for Samsung given that they’re now pushing Android upgrades to 3 years with 4 year of security updates.
Anyway, here is a good video that gives a bit of an overview based on what is known however we’ll need to wait for more in depth analysis once the phone is shipping in volume.
Another week, another beta release by Apple of the next macOS update, macOS 12.2, unfortunately there is nothing listed in the release notes but that could because the fixes are security focused (the details of those security fixes get made available after the update is released). Regarding whether not Webkit has been updated, I’ve checked the Webkit and it appears they haven’t made available a new build – that could be due to people still waiting to get back from Christmas and New Years break but I guess as we get closer to February that we’ll eventually get to see the updates roll out.
That all being said, there is still a long way to go in regards to filling in the functionality gap between Webkit vs Blink (Chromium engine). There is work being done on the Manifest V3 – although there is a lot of controversy, I’ve been reading through the mailing lists and it appears that all the various players in developing the standard are coming together, listening to feedback, ensuring that all the different browsers are happy with each feature as it develops. The disappointing part of Webkit has also been the latest security hole found in Webkit (it appears to not have been fixed in the latest beta release of macOS, iOS, iPadOS etc. based on the chatter occurring on reddit and twitter):
And to make matters worse it was reported to Apple in November last year. It’s all very well and good to boast about your privacy policy but if your software is like Swiss cheese then it kind of undercuts the idea of being a privacy focused business. As a side note, I really do wish that Apple fans would stop spouting the nonsense that ‘Google sells your data to third parties’ when in reality they don’t – an advertiser says “I want to target…” then followed by a list of demographic information, Google gives them a quote and then runs the ads targeting those people, no data changes hands. With all that being said, why would any business voluntarily give up data they’ve collected which gives them a competitive advantage? this is one of the reasons I unsubscribed to the Apple subreddit – I’m all good when it comes to differences of opinion but that being said we must agree on the same set of facts or otherwise having a discussion in the first place is entirely pointless.
Still using Chrome although I tend to have a love/hate relationship with the Twitter app for Mac (which is based on the iPadOS version which utilises the ‘Catalyst’ framework on Mac ro bring it over with minimal recoding). Unfortunately the integration with macOS is pretty horrible – it isn’t as buggy as it was when they first introduced it but even now really basic things don’t work properly. Take the spelling which is iffy reliability – either missing words completely or putting a red squiggly line under words that are actually correctly spelt. Long story short, although there is a novelty element associated with having those applications on macOS, the problems start to arise when you expect them to behave like macOS applications for example respecting the system defaults (if you click on a link it opens up the link in Safari even though you might have set as the default another brother in ‘System Preferences’.
The end of another week of work – hopefully as we drift further from the new years holiday that things will get back to normal as people return to the office. I’m keeping an eye on the technology news with the latest rumours being that Microsoft is going to release Android 11 soon for the Duo 2 but the big focus is on shipping Android 12L. I have a feeling that Android 12L makes a lot more sense since the multiscreen improvements will be baked into Android natively rather than Microsoft having to merge their own enhancements into Android as they did with the initial release (the customisation making the process costly in terms of manpower when compared to Android 12L where those features will come ‘out of the box’ for Microsoft).
Hopefully by mid-February I can finally get rid of the ‘interest free’ deal with Spark which will give me a few extra dollars in the pocket so then I can focus on my long term goals of upgrading my two Macs to Apple Silicon based on ones – although I’m going to play it conservatively to see how Windows 11 plays out along with what AMD have on offer. What I am looking out for is their greater use of WinUI 2.6 such as the recent revival of Windows Media Player with a new modern UI, Notepad has also been updates along with a few other components. The benefit of WinUI is the ability to retain win32 code but put a fresh front end on it which avoids the costly mistake of re-writing something from scratch. In the case of Windows Media Player, that is going to be replacing the Groove Music application and eventually the old classic Windows Media Player as well. Long term I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually see all the components either upgraded WinUI 2.6 based versions or just simply remove them completely because it has been replaced with something new as with the case of Microsoft Management Console being replaced with Windows Admin Center.
I’ve decided to leave the /r/apple subreddit – it has gradually turned more and more toxic – god forbid you post an opinion that doesn’t hold up Apple has God’s gift to humanity because prepare yourself of a torrent of downvotes and abuse by the self appointed ‘swiss guards’ aka online keyboard warriors bending over backwards to ‘protect’ a trillion dollar company from some mild criticism. For me I see reddit as a place to hang out and shoot the breeze, if the said subreddit is filled with people who cause trouble and abuse the up/down vote system then I don’t see much point being part of that subreddit in the first place. The problem could easily be solved by allowing moderators to see who up/down voted then keep track of those who brigade, use sock puppet accounts etc then ban them off the website thus leaving the productive non-toxic contributors left on the website. Funny enough the Android subreddit has open and frank discussions about the shortcomings of Android as well as iOS without people reacting as if you had just slapped their mother.
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