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tpcollins

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 17, 2012
171
19
I’m at my system limit of OS Sierra on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

Some features don’t work in Safari - Youtube, certain Buy it Now options on eBay, etc.

I have Microsoft Edge available that I tole in and out of. I was at the Apple store to get some crap removed off my MacBook and the gal says she has Google Chrome on her Apple laptop as it works best with her college course.

Is this ok to download. Plus I can’t find a good link to download from. Thanks.
 
If privacy is a major concern, Edge is not the best choice. Here's an earlier thread with a discussion of various browsers:
 
I'm aware that they can be patched to run Big Sur, but unsure what 'nearly natively' means.

Apple basically just blacklisted the mid-2012 cMBP from Big Sur. The drivers/kexts are still all there in the OS. So even if you OTA upgrade, it will boot normally even before its patched. SIP is still enabled etc.

On Monterey, there is no longer gpu support, so whenever you OTA upgrade, you have the annoying first start menu you will have to go through without graphics acceleration. You also dont have SIP because you need root patching.
 
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Chrome isn't really a good choice for anything. I went back to Firefox about a year ago across all my devices (other than my iPhone due to lack of native ad-blocking) and haven't looked back.
 
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