Should we upgrade to High Sierra to avoid the Meltdown, Spectre risks?

[hajime]

Hello, prior to the announcement of the risks, I had not upgraded to High Sierra because some users mentioned about issues with Higher Sierra. Given the risks, for those users running Mac OS Sierra, is it recommended to upgrade to High Sierra or stay with Sierra for the time being?

Will upgrading to High Sierra sometimes slows down the computer by 5-30% as mentioned in some sites?

 

[TekAdvice]

I would strongly advise upgrading to High Sierra. If you do not, you risk becoming affected by the Meltdown or Spectre issues with Intel. I have the latest version of High Sierra and have not experienced any decrease in performance. At worst you may experience a lessening of battery life.

 

[hajime]

I would strongly advise upgrading to High Sierra. If you do not, you risk becoming affected by the Meltdown or Spectre issues with Intel. I have the latest version of High Sierra and have not experienced any decrease in performance. At worst you may experience a lessening of battery life.

Thanks. So, Apple does not include the fixes in Sierra?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Hard to tell what the official statement is on older versions of MacOS getting patched. Originally, Apple said Sierra and El Capitan were also patched, but later removed references to that. Perhaps they intended to patch them, but are still working on it. Supposedly, even High Sierra has more patching to go.

 

[ZapNZs]

There are too many unknowns at this point to say what the most prudent actions are, IMO.

From what I have read, Apple has already pushed some patches, and plans to push others. There also appears to be disagreements as to the performance toll that such updates will have.

 

[kschendel]

Or, you could not worry about it, and be vigilant about not running unknown software on your machine, checking for unknown daemons every now and again, etc. Which you should be doing anyway.

Meltdown and friends are just an attack vector. If you don't pick up a virus that exploits the vulnerability you don't have a problem. Plus, it's an information leak vulnerability, so depending on what you have on your computer, it may not really matter. The cloud providers are probably the ones with the biggest exposure.

 

[HDFan]

I had not upgraded to High Sierra because some users mentioned about issues with Higher Sierra.

What issues?

 

[hajime]

What issues?

Maybe some stability issues?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-this-a-good-time-to-upgrade-to-high-sierra.2086428/

 

[HDFan]

There certainly have been issues, the security and password ones being the most obvious, but as far as stability goes, I haven't seen any widespread reports of crashes or freezes.

Meltdown and Spectre as far as I know are still theoretical, but certainly will become issues now that they are public. You're better off with the latest version of the OS since that will be highest priority for security updates. [I am wondering what is going to happen with all of those Windows NT systems.]

Your major concern would be whether the software you use supports High Sierra.

 

[hajime]

I upgraded to High Sierra few days ago. One issue I have is as follows:

- Surfing the internet using Firefox Quantum
- Switch user
- After switching back to my account, Firefox Quantum becomes non-responsive.

Not sure if it is a problem with Firefox or High Sierra.

Know how to fix this issue? I often have to reboot the computer.

 

[HDFan]

I assume you're using Firefox 57.0.4 and you've updated to the latest High Sierra version.

Does this always happen, or does it happen just on specific webpages? If it always happens on one webpage, does the same thing happen in Chrome or Safari?

Try creating a new test user and repeat the same tests.

Why can't you just force quit Firefox? Why do you have to reboot?
What mac are you using?

 

[MrAverigeUser]

Since Meltdown and spectre are strictly hardware-related, HS is as concerned as any OS before.

apple did deliver security fixes (as much as possible) for High Sierra, but for Sierra and ElCapitan as well !!
so - no need at all to add-on the risk of the not-yet-stable HS - the which had its own horrible SOFTWARE-security issues (as reaching administrator rights even without knowing the password.... just one example

Concerning Meltdown/Spectre there are also security patches for safari and firefox ....

as a bottom line: HS is not at all safer than Sierra or ElCapitan....