iOS 26 ‘upgrade’

[Writer61]

Chrome can access passwords stored in the iCloud Keychain, at least on Mac OS. Not sure about iOS.

OK, thanks. I haven't used Chrome for a while, and never on iOS.

 

[MrPixel]

I don't trust Chrome any further than I can throw it. It's spyware; to what extent I can't speak with any authority. It's snooping has been reported multiple times, and this snooping is the subject of an Apple TV commercial for Safari.

<TMI> or tl;dr, your preference:

Browsers I keep for MacOS/OSX -

Vivaldi - My primary these days. European (Norwegian), with all their sensibilities about privacy. It's a bit of a system hog because it is feature-rich, but it runs great on my older Mac and older OS. For what I do it's even more stable than Firefox.
DuckDuckGo - When I want to purge the browsing trail. Not that I'm doing anything nefarious, I just like a clean slate on quitting after browsing sites that pile-on the trackers. Not good for some sites with embedded video, like NYT, but I use it for them anyway because of their tracker addiction.
Tor Browser - For the nefarious browsing. Its built-in sort of VPN prevents the ISP from gathering data on my activities. The multi-hop privacy layering makes it too slow for general browsing, and many US-based sites will lock it out if the exit hop is offshore.
Firefox - Used to be my primary. Stable, will start it up if I'm having problems with other sites that smell like the bug is on my end.
Safari - Only if nothing else works. Some sites are quite rigid about only functioning properly with MS, Apple, and Google browsers, and will tell you so, including nags about "Use Chrome for the best experience." I take my business elsewhere 100% of the time with those.
SeaMonkey - Has a built-in simple website GUI editor.
Brave - Testing purposes only. It's privacy-oriented, but a lot of sites break and its search engine is horrible.

Firefox on my Win7 partition and older OSX. Also Firefox on iOS devices and several Linux machines. I've touched Chromium on Linux, but that's only long enough to download Firefox. I have a handful of Android tablets for a special project and of course they run Chrome, but they're on an isolated network and never talk to the real world.

</TMI>

 

[onehitwanda]

Tor Browser - For the nefarious browsing. Its built-in sort of VPN prevents the ISP from gathering data on my activities. The multi-hop privacy layering makes it too slow for general browsing, and many US-based sites will lock it out if the exit hop is offshore.

Tor is not anonymous, and while the ISPs can't see your traffic they can almost certainly tell that it's TOR traffic which already puts you into a class of villain Never make the mistake of thinking it hides you, though - just like Bitcoin, it's only a question of compute to backtrace you, and compute is a commodity item these days.

Better to buy a second hand burner phone and do your nefarious stuff on that. And possibly keep it in a faraday cage when you're not using it

 

[onehitwanda]

I honestly find it genuinly sad, actually.

I know, right. The need to chase advertising dollars destroying the use case that actually made them relevant in the first place.

I don't generally even bother with Google any more unless I'm searching something truly arbitrary.

 

[stickygirl]

A microwave is an effective Faraday cage

I use multiple browsers too
Chrome at work
DuckGo for shopping etc
Firefox for general use and
Opera for here
Safari on my phone
I've used a paid-for VPN for a couple of years.
Browsers are all info-junkies, hence the different ones, so there's less chance of them joining the dots. As for ICE demanding to know your social media history at immigration control => Politics forum

The trick that is becoming mandatory these days is re-booting on a regular basis. My M4 gets in a tizz over dumb background things like a random Help page, or some CoreServices things that eat up CPU. It took me a while to figure out why it was happening and the answers were out there. Once AI really gets going those issues will get worse and worse.

I heard the energy needed to generate a 40Mb image in AI is equivalent to boiling a mug of water. Figures...

 

[Jorunn]

What I love about IOS 26 is that it now takes two taps and a swish to do what I used to be able to do with one tap!

 

[Writer61]

As for ICE demanding to know your social media history at immigration control => Politics forum

I think checking all my email addresses would blow their systems.

My M4 gets in a tizz over dumb background things like a random Help page, or some CoreServices things that eat up CPU. It took me a while to figure out why it was happening and the answers were out there. Once AI really gets going those issues will get worse and worse.

My M1 has been getting confuzzled a lot recently. Upgrade ahoy!

 

[alohadave]

I hate windows 10, but I hate windows 11 much, much more.

Tor is not anonymous, and while the ISPs can't see your traffic they can almost certainly tell that it's TOR traffic which already puts you into a class of villain Never make the mistake of thinking it hides you, though - just like Bitcoin, it's only a question of compute to backtrace you, and compute is a commodity item these days.

Better to buy a second hand burner phone and do your nefarious stuff on that. And possibly keep it in a faraday cage when you're not using it

Besides the fact that the anyone can setup a TOR server and make a honeypot.

 

[onehitwanda]

Besides the fact that the anyone can setup a TOR server and make a honeypot.

though it takes a brave or possibly suicidal person to run an exit node

 

[stickygirl]

I think checking all my email addresses would blow their systems.


My M1 has been getting confuzzled a lot recently. Upgrade ahoy!

Have a look at the activity monitor - it might show up the culprit. IOS is so bullet proof you can delete errant threads and reboot. Chances are there’s something eating cpu

 

[MrPixel]

Better to buy a second hand burner phone and do your nefarious stuff on that.

Nothing truly nefarious, just "adult", and not (currently!) illegal, by any definition. It's like a deadbolt on the front door - just takes a bit of extra effort for the snoopers. If the ISP gets their nose out of joint, fuck 'em, I have alternatives, anyway. The only time they bothered me about anything was when I made the error of letting a tenant use the studio WiFi directly and not through a firewall. I got a couple of nastygrams about Torrent traffic to pirate sites because the idiot didn't have a clue about network hygiene. I unplugged the access point within seconds after getting the first report.

though it takes a brave or possibly suicidal person to run an exit node

No shit.

Opera for here

Oh. Completely forgot about Opera. I have it, just don't see it addressing any need that's not handled by the others.

 

[stickygirl]

though it takes a brave or possibly suicidal person to run an exit node

Only weird people run round tors. Like those iron man types that die of heart failure at 35yrs

 

[MrPixel]

I don't generally even bother with Google any more unless I'm searching something truly arbitrary.

Same here with one big exception - Google Maps. I was a cartographer in a previous life and even developed a mapping and mobile geolocation app, and Google Maps and Streets is pretty damn good these days. I must have Maps up several times a day doing research for my stories. Their change of vendors for satellite images sucks a big one, however. I have to stoop to using Google Earth to get archived content from the previous source.

 

[Writer61]

Have a look at the activity monitor - it might show up the culprit. IOS is so bullet proof you can delete errant threads and reboot. Chances are there’s something eating cpu

I have, main culprits were two Exchange service daemons, that have been tamed by switching of notes and contacts sync for that account (thanks to someone on the Apple support forum for that).

Worst offender now in NordVPN which is fluctuating between 15% and 19% of CPU. Why does it need that much?????

 

[stickygirl]

I have, main culprits were two Exchange service daemons, that have been tamed by switching of notes and contacts sync for that account (thanks to someone on the Apple support forum for that).

Worst offender now in NordVPN which is fluctuating between 15% and 19% of CPU. Why does it need that much?????

Had a similar problem with nord except it was their help app that was clearly stuck in a revolving door and the unit got pretty hot. I killed it with the activity monitor and that was it. Now I check the temp with my hand . To be fair it’s thrown a wobbly about half as dozen times in a year.

ETA. The other thing that went crazy was Pages, so I make sure I quit when I’m done

 

[iwatchus]

I have had pages use crazy amount of resources on me sometimes. No idea how they got it to do that

 

[stickygirl]

I have had pages use crazy amount of resources on me sometimes. No idea how they got it to do that

I’m pretty sure it’s AI or a rudimentary version of it. In my case I have the files in iCloud so it’s constantly churning, BUT it’s just a fucking word processor, not running CERN!!

 

[Writer61]

The other thing that went crazy was Pages, so I make sure I quit when I’m done

I use the MS Office apps rather than the Apple equivalents. It means I can work with clients on my own Mac desktop/laptop rather than the Windows laptops they issue. Also, 30 years of muscle memory is hard to overcome.

 

[Writer61]

From this thread, it seems many of us use macOS rather than Windows. That is not entirely surprising, given the topic is iOS, but I wonder whether the wider Lit community skews that way.

 

[MrPixel]

I have had pages use crazy amount of resources on me sometimes. No idea how they got it to do that

I do all my writing in Pages these days and haven't really noticed any performance degradation or memory bloat. I usually leave it up. However, DDG with The Times open will hammer the system into mush. I usually launch System Monitor to verify what's going on, and invariably it's DDG. Vivaldi hasn't proven to be a problem that way, but Firefox sure was.

 

[jsmiam]

A few days into it, it’s (my 26.2 upgrade from 18.x) definitely also draining the battery faster. Even the battery app acknowledges it with exclamation marks.

 

[iwatchus]

I do all my writing in Pages these days and haven't really noticed any performance degradation or memory bloat. I usually leave it up. However, DDG with The Times open will hammer the system into mush. I usually launch System Monitor to verify what's going on, and invariably it's DDG. Vivaldi hasn't proven to be a problem that way, but Firefox sure was.

I have a reasonably loaded MacBook Pro. Either 48gb so it doesn’t crush me. But I have seen it over 10gb which is absurd for a few hundred of pages of text

 

[MrPixel]

I do all my writing in Pages these days and haven't really noticed any performance degradation or memory bloat.

Boy did I jinx myself. This morning I had to have been 500 words into a new story and Pages suddenly g...o...t......r...e...a...l......s...l...o...w. Command-S and crossed my fingers.

Whew. It saved.