Safari 12

Yeah, I have the same problem with my old MacPro running 10.12.6 (the attempted upgrade to 10.13 didn’t go well, so I decided not to do it). Basically I can’t watch video on it in Safari, and it’s been that way for a while. Chrome sometimes works in those situations, but I have an Apple TV and various iPads so I don’t watch Netflix on my Mac Pro.

Is it actually true that Ghostery and other ad/tracker blockers will slow your browser down like Apple claims? I mean, it might increase processing time on the computer, but won’t the actual speed up in loading the page more than make up for it 99% of the time?

I use OsiriX for that. The Lite version is free, doesn’t require Silverlight and requires macOS 10.10.

-Al-

1 Like

It’s not possible. SIP protected and the WebKit component is used by many other apps.

-Al-

The information says the hardware requirement is limited to Safari so HTML5 video should be used in other browsers, like Chrome. My guess it’s a bit of Apple paternalism, that older CPUs/chipsets lack H.264 hardware encoding.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/22822

---- Joseph tidbits-talk@talk.tidbits.com wrote:

Is it actually true that Ghostery and other ad/tracker blockers will slow your browser down like Apple claims? I mean, it might increase processing time on the computer, but won’t the actual speed up in loading the page more than make up for it 99% of the time?

If I recall correctly, and I heard this years ago so it might be outdated. Ad blockers scan and vet vet all the information on a page, which can slow
loading times.

Nope. They scan all outgoing requests, and block some of them, which is quite a bit different than scanning everything on the page.

My problem is with Citrix Receiver and Java, it seems. I use these for two critical purposes at work. Neither seem to be extensions (I reviewed SixColors post and I have no extensions in the Library folder except 1Password, which does work). I updated Citrix and it works up to a point. There seems to be a plug-in, Citrix Viewer, that is necessary to connect to the application I need and it won’t work. It still works in Chrome. The other is a Java applet that won’t run any more. Am I stuck using two browsers? You all probably do that routinely, but it’s a bit of a hassle for lil’ ol’ me. Thanks.

The speed up in loading a page comes from NOT loading the ads. The cost in checking for ad requests is relatively minimal.

Right. That’s precisely why I wonder whether Apple’s claim is right.

I’ve found the Safari 12 update disturbing for a few reasons.

  1. I’d already reported a bug in Safari 11 that causes videos in the browser to stall. I call it ‘The Seven Minute Safari Stall Bug.’ The time to stall is variable but averages to about seven minutes. I had it happening on all my boot partitions on all my Macs consistently. It has no relationship to hardware I can ascertain. It’s specifically a Safari bug. Apple ignored my report (a common outcome of the bug reports I’ve sent them via AppleSeed and one reason I don’t bother to beta test for them any longer). Safari 12 has the exact same bug, except now I find that after three video stalls, my Macs are prone to a total lockup apart from the cursor. macOS eventually cleans up the mess, but waiting around five or more minutes for it to do so is not tolerable.

  2. Similar to Apple’s poor rollout of their APFS, I’ve found Apple’s rollout of Safari extension blocking to be a mess. Messages that ad and JavaScript blockers ‘may slow down’ my Macs are nonsense. They actually speed up page loading, a well known fact. Having to play workaround games to get excellent extensions to work again is unacceptable. The stupefaction of great extensions into stunted app versions makes no sense.

  3. If I had a sense that real security was being accomplished by these changes, I would appreciate them. But I don’t at all. Instead, I now believe Safari is less secure. My prime example is the permanent disablement of the JS Blocker extension. How did Apple mess that up? I’ve chatted via email with the developer, Travis at Toggleable.com. Unless Apple changes its mind, JS Blocker is dead. I want it back. It only added to Safari security.

All of this sadly fits into Apple consistent malaise regarding macOS over the last few years. Again, disturbing.

I’ve managed to get uBlock Origin, the AdBlock Plus extension (vs the lame ‘app’ version), TamperMonkey (along with the AdBlock Blocker script) and the AdGuard extension to work again. I’ll be keeping them working.

The saddest sacrifice to this blundering change by Apple is JS Blocker, which I used constantly. It did nothing but improve Safari security. Safari is now less secure without it. The developer has told me JS Blocker is dead unless Apple changes their Safari stupored minds.

BTW: BIG thanks to Jason and Dan for their great article ‘Give new life to old extensions in Safari 12’. I’ll be busy working around Apple’s Safari mess tomorrow.

I’ve not experienced that with Safari 11 or 12. Have you found others discussing this problem anywhere?

If you’re running macOS 10.12.6 Sierra and Safari 12, are you seeing any problems with Spotlight crashing during searches? The workaround seems to be to disable Spotlight indexing of Bookmarks & History.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8546951

I had one last night during a couple of hour period of time I was running Sierra. I made several successful Spotlight searches before and after the crash.

ARGH!!! I complained about this over a week ago - can’t wait to try the fix, it drives me nuts!

Diane

Hey Folks,

With almost 100% consistency on macOS 10.12.6 if I type more than 1 word in the pop-up Spotlight UI.

@dianed143 and others – Take Note of the workaround:

The problem goes aways as soon as I disable Safari Bookmarks and History items in the Search Results panel of the System’s Spotlight preferences.

(I use LaunchBar for this anyway, so it’s not a hardship for me.)

An engineer friend and I sussed this out Thursday when we talked and found we were having the same problem.

Until then we both thought the problem was local to our machines, and I suspect the issue is under-reported for that reason.

-Chris

I too can confirm the failure. I almost never use spotlight but after reading Christopher’s post and ACE’s reply thought I’d give it a go. 100% failure until I dialed Bookmarks & History in Spotlight’s system prefs. Am running on macOS 10.12.6 as well.

Hey Seth,

FWIW I just ran a vid on Netflix without Silverlight using Google Chrome v70.0.3538.22 on my venerable 17-inch, Mid 2010 i7 MacBook Pro.

-Chris

It worked for me! It’s been flawless since I made the change last night.

I wasn’t even able to type an entire word. I’d have to hit command-space, wait, type the first letter and wait and see what showed up in the list, then select. If what I wanted wasn’t there I’d try another letter. I could rarely get more than 2 and sometimes could not even do one.

I did discover the shortcut for searching in the finder which would work all the time, but I’d have to mouse over to click my selection.

Diane