Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

I use Lockdown Mode on my Mac because I don’t use iMessage, FaceTime, or other apple services on that device. It’s literally just a computer for software dev and maybe YouTube videos. I haven’t noticed any difference with web content either, but I also use Firefox / Chrome instead of Safari. What I would really like to see is options. For example on iOS I use shared photo albums, so it would be nice to keep that feature but disable all the other capabilities.

View on HN

> I haven’t noticed any difference with web content either, but I also use Firefox / Chrome instead of Safari

Lockdown mode only affects Safari. If you use another browser, it doesn't make any difference.

Here are some features that are disabled in Safari when lockdown mode is enabled:

- JIT

- Remote fonts

- WebAssembly

- WebGL

- WebRTC

- PDF Viewer

- MP3 Playback

- Gamepad API

- Web Audio API

- Speech Recognition API

- MathML

- JPEG 2000

- MediaDevices.getUserMedia()

You can configure most of those in Firefox and Chrome, but it has to be done manually and cannot be disabled easily on a per-site basis like in Safari.

> For example on iOS I use shared photo albums, so it would be nice to keep that feature but disable all the other capabilities.

I'm in the same boat. I was a bit confused, since I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you could selectively disable it for some "apps", but I've never found out how to disable it for photos specifically.

My requirements of my phone being otherwise slim, I didn't encounter any other issue with lockdown mode.

Ironically, you need it all the more specifically on the devices you like to use those services with. Even moreso than on the devices you don't use them with. The fact of the matter is Lockdown makes iMessage as safe as is possible (I still wouldn't take the risk, personally, but YOLO). It doesn't hurt to be using Lockdown everywhere.

Lockdown mode? How do I enable it? As someone who owns a Macbook as their only Apple product, I hate seeing or dealing with Apple pushing their services to me

Read this page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212650

Sounds like it's not foolproof unless you enable lockdown mode on all devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com