I can't believe the recommended solution is "backup and reinstall your operating system".
A browser shouldn't be so integral, that if it breaks the only option is to wipe your computer and start again.
A browser shouldn't be so integral, that if it breaks the only option is to wipe your computer and start again.
As for Safari, I switched to Firefox when they disabled uBlock Origin, so I don't know how it works these days.
Fwiw: Im using safari on both iOS and MacOS, macos with kablock and iOS with firefox focus and the experience has been good.
It's not as bad as no adblocking altogether, but very far from firefox with ubo on Android.
It's good enough to use however, and android has it's own issues.
FF's extension interface allows more sophisticated rules & blocking behavior, and uBO takes advantage of that. You may be fortunate that you don't happen to spend time on sites where it makes a difference, but I'll say from experience that I do see ads and annoyances on some sites on my iPad that I do not see on my laptop or Android phone (both running FF with uBO). It's not a huge difference - as was said above, Safari with content blockers is certainly usable, but uBO is still better.
I am speculating a bit here because I haven't dug too deeply to confirm this, but I think one technique sites use to work around ad blockers that Apple-platform content blockers don't handle well but uBO does is serving ad content from the same origin as real content (and even with similar paths as real assets). Last I looked, Safari content blockers were mostly limited to old-style rules of "block assets matching this URL" and "block this css selector on this site", so when sites do the work to make ad assets look the same as real content assets, that can't be blocked as effectively with content blockers. uBO can inspect the DOM and other aspects of the page content blockers can't, so it can do more to detect those techniques and block them.
Everything else was optional.
Macs, to boot today, need, at a minimum:
* three partitions
* two OS installations comprising dozens/hundreds of files (three separate macOS installations on M1 macs)
* T2/M1 hardware-specific activation data
* BridgeOS (on T2 systems)
I remember being worried when OS X was first previewed (btw, everyone, for the last time it's pronounced "ten") that they would ruin the "drag and drop two files and a folder" simplicity that the mac was known for with this complicated new system.
Indeed I was right. It's a real bummer how non-modular macOS is these days. It's a giant ball of mud, and the only recommended method of modifying it is format and reinstall, which burns a couple hours: just like Windows.
What I don't understand is why the apple installer and updater seems to do a lengthy installation, when it seems to be effectively creating a "sealed image". Does anyone know of a good resource explaining the modern MacOS installer?
It strikes me Apple could ship a delta image for the system subvolume, and just ensure the hash is correct before rebooting. That seems to not be what's being done, given the length of time an update takes. I wonder why they don't do this though, given it seems nothing can edit the system volume, so it ought to be shipped as an image?
The installer being better isn't going to sell more computers; it ain't really broken, so there would need to be some real incentive to do anything other than incrementally fixing it. (This is not to discount the small amounts of polish they add to these tools bit by bit over time as they are incrementally improved, such as the black full screen background for the system updater.) A total overhaul of such a central system (used regularly by millions of machines during updates) is a gigantic risk, to put it mildly. They also just took one such big risk with the whole APFS migration/system volume thing, which to their credit went well.
Every now and then Apple will actually rewrite an app, like they did to Disk Utility not long ago. This usually makes it worse, and relegates anyone serious to the command line tools (which are fortunately quite complete and comprehensive, even if their man pages aren't).
I have a feeling they spend the most high-quality application developer resources on things like iWork and FCP and stuff that users actually live and breathe every day, not stuff they run a few times a year unattended.
Telling users to re-install the system seems a little drastic and seems like the last thing Apple would recommend were you take your machine to the genius bar...