Apple Releases macOS Big Sur 11.7.4 With Fix for Safari Favorite Icons

[bob.vicktor]

I think a large part of the perception of Snow Leopard was based on how slow Leopard was. I have an old G4 that I play with, installing different OS’s and old games, and every version of OS X up until Tiger performed better than its predecessor on the same hardware in most aspects. Leopard was a huge step backwards in that regard. Snow Leopard mostly brought back the responsiveness that Tiger had. If only it had supported PowerPCs!

Yeah, it really was incredible to see each version get faster. 10.4 was incredible. Personally I loved 10.5, and it was plenty fast for me, but my brother preferred 10.4.

A lot of what improved 10.6 over 10.5 was dropping PPC support so it could be leaner and optimized for just the one architecture, so it couldn't have been as good and still support PPC unfortunately. PPC really was an incredible architecture for a long time (and still is, really), but the time had come to switch to Intel. I mean, the G4 PowerBooks were getting pretty pathetic performance wise. 😔

 

[bob.vicktor]

bug in the browser - update your whole OS... just Apple things...

As others have mentioned, Safari is an integral part of the OS because many applications use WebViews and that is all built together.

As far as the 'update your whole OS' bit, this improved greatly with macOS 13 Ventura. Big Sur introduced the Signed System Volume, which is an incredible step forward in security and system reliability, but it came at the cost of requiring massive updates for any little change, including Safari. Apple engineers knew about this of course, but progress requires compromise and time to get things built and tested.

macOS 12 improved update sizes a bit, and macOS 13 Ventura has reduced update sizes substantially with the use of something called a Cryptex (and install times has improved as well). Basically, macOS can now be updated with small 'add on' changes that don't require downloading the whole core OS every time. Here are some great blog posts about how that works:

How does Ventura update faster? Inside the macOS update process

Three phases of updating, download, preparation and installation, are now fully integrated. They also involve updating Cryptexes, as revealed in the log.

eclecticlight.co

Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates

Expected in Ventura 13.1 is a new lightweight system for applying security patches. This article explains how it uses cryptexes, already being used in macOS 13.

eclecticlight.co

 

[bob.vicktor]

Glad that Apple got this Big Sur macOS update out to fix the bugs people have been having. Will install it and give it a try. I am not a big fan of Ventura. Don't like the confusing new menus in Ventura either.

Personally I have no issues with Ventura, and after a little time with System Settings I've come to find everything as well as I used to in System Preferences (which I have used since Mac OS X 10.1 all those years ago...).

But if you really don't want Ventura why not use macOS 12 Monterey? It improves a number of the issues Big Sur had, doesn't do anything radical or breaking, will get better security support (Big Sur will be dropped in September when macOS 14 comes out), has better developer support for apps, and has smaller and quicker to install updates.
(Disclaimer: I'm a macOS application developer, and as much as I loved Big Sur when it came out, I am now very much looking forward to dropping support for it in our application; it just causes headaches at this point.)

 

[bob.vicktor]

Are there macOS fixes included that instead of a Safari update release they released an update to Big Sur?

There may have been macOS fixes, but not necessarily. In Big Sur updating Safari required updating the whole OS because of the Signed System Volume (see my other comment above). That has been fixed in macOS 13 Ventura.

 

[bob.vicktor]

Then, there is the 30 min of "Preparing macOS Ventura..." on a M1 MBA 🙃

I remember the days when all of that time was staring at a blank screen. At least now most of the prep time is done ahead of time and the restart is a lot quicker.