This is Technology Bytes, episode 85 for October 20th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this is going to be a bit of a repeat because I’ve talked about Safari before in a previous episode, and I covered things like tab groups and those kinds of things with the new onset of Apple intelligence, they have other things that Safari does, but I’m really going back to the basics of how I use it on a regular basis.
And the reason it has come up, you’ll understand as I go through my story here, but the fact is that even I’m an Apple guy, I guess, through and through, and I really enjoy using Apple technology for my, you know, base operation of apps and all those kinds of things.
I, I don’t use a lot of third-party apps.
I know there are some that, that are maybe better than maybe what Apple offers.
And sometimes I use those because of that, but for the most part, I try to stay in the Apple world and Safari is one of those places.
Now you may say that I’m missing out on things because of that, but I find, especially in the Apple universe, and I use it on my iPad a lot, that Safari just outperforms every other browser that is available on Apple’s platforms.
So I’m going to go backwards a little bit, and you may remember me talking about this at some point and, you know, when you’re using technology and you enjoy its benefits, when it gets taken away, it becomes a bit of a pain.
And, and I think of, you know, in the, I talked about my wifi mesh and bringing some of the activity back that seemed to be missing by extending my wifi outside of my house so that things like my garage door and things like that worked better.
So in the world of Safari, when I went to, and I know this is my own fault, but when I installed the developer beta of iPadOS 18, and then the Sequoia, yeah, Sequoia betas on my iMac and on my MacBook Air, and I also installed it on my phone, I had some major problems with how I use Safari at work.
And so for a while it would do most of what I needed, but not everything.
And I use tab groups a lot at work.
And so I’m on my iMac, let’s say, and I’m opening websites in a certain tab group to do my job.
And then when something happens in that, when I see something in those tabs that I open in the information that it presents to me, I need to, on occasion, go out to the manufacturing floor and look up information or see if what I’m seeing is really the way that things are working.
And it’s just a matter of picking up my iPad, walking out to the manufacturing floor.
And every tab that I had open on my iMac is now right there available for me on my iPad.
And that stopped working to a point where I could not use Safari to do my job any longer.
And so I ended up putting, I tried to do Firefox.
That didn’t work well at all with our tools.
They’re all in-house built tools, but it just didn’t work.
And then I went to, um, Chrome and that at least worked so I could do my job.
And then I turned on the, the equivalent of tab groups in Chrome so that I could have that same experience, but it doesn’t work because, um, Chrome or Google in their infinite wisdom has chosen not to implement tab group function in Chrome on the iPad.
And so I’ve lost quite a bit of functionality then of how I would like to do my work.
And that has been from the very beginning of the beta world.
And then the next beta would come out and I’ve always been on the developer beta since they started, um, because I’m not very smart, I guess.
And so I would, every time the beta updated, I would test and Safari would be back, but generally only momentarily, sometimes in the midst of using it, it would fail.
Or if I ever rebooted a computer or turned my iPad off and back on all of a sudden Safari would not work anymore.
And it was, it was very much of a pain to have to use Chrome for doing my work because it just didn’t work like Safari does.
It didn’t present itself to make my work life more effective and efficient as I was getting from Safari, but I could still do my work.
I could still use the Apple products.
I would talk to our senior developer, our, our CTO at our work.
And, and he always said, I’m surprised that you’re able to use Apple products at all to do what we do here.
So, um, they’re not interested in trying to figure out exactly why my world isn’t working, but it was painful.
And then I started to get used to it and started to use Chrome, um, because that was my only option and I just made it work and I found workarounds for things that I would do on Safari.
And that is just how I live my life through all of these betas from the latest and greatest operating systems.
And that continued even, and because I didn’t do the actual release versions of these software installations, so no, um, iPadOS 18, I was still on the beta.
So I’m running at 18.1, whatever.
And, and, uh, Sequoia 15.1, whatever, and playing with the Apple intelligence stuff, but just continuing to experience the pain at work of not being able to use Safari.
And then somewhere that changed.
And I say somewhere, but I know where, where it was, and it was, uh, really, um, 18.1.
See, what am I on now?
Beta seven.
So I think it was 18.1 beta five and then 15.1 beta five that all of a sudden I could, I don’t know, there was just something I could see.
I’d almost stopped trying to get Safari to work, but there’s just something as I was just using Safari for non-work things that just made it feel like it was back.
And so I thought, I wonder if I can use this for work once again.
And sure enough, and it was solid, it did everything I wanted it to do, just as it had done before the ability to be more effective and more efficient at work was such a joy to replace the pain of the previous really weeks, months, I guess, because it’s from June to what is now October.
And maybe it was towards the end of November that things were, were finally healed as it were.
And I have gone through two more beta cycles since then, and Safari continues to work.
I can reboot my computer.
I can reboot my iPad.
I can turn Safari off and close it and then reopen it and it still works.
And it is just super rock solid as it had been for the first year plus that I had used it where I now work.
And just the ability to have my tab groups back to be able to, to know that when I set up my computer after walking on the production floor, that the websites I was at, the tools that I was using for work would be right there in the same spot, in the same position as I was using on the production floor and vice versa from my office out.
And then it actually, I use a tab group significantly between the MacBook Air and the iMac and just having that mirroring, that tab group work as it does in Safari and to have it back after having it been taken away for so many weeks was just so amazing.
And I went and told the, you know, CTO and he says, Oh, I’m glad.
I mean, there’s nothing that they did as far as their concern that changed anything.
And, you know, and I basically just said, well, it looks like Apple finally fixed it.
And I did do, um, the feedback so that Apple knew I was having problems with Safari and what I was trying to do.
Problem is I couldn’t give them any examples because Safari worked fine on every website, except for the work tools that we built ourselves.
Well, I say we, that, that our technology team built, and so there was really nothing that Apple could do.
Um, I contacted a couple of, uh, podcasts that I listened to, to just let them know that this is what was happening and see if they had thoughts of something I hadn’t tried.
But the reason that I’m rehashing this information is just because technology should bring us joy.
And when it fails to work as we would like it to, it inflicts pain.
And that happens in my household.
And so my wife is coming to me and saying, why doesn’t this work anymore?
Why doesn’t that work anymore?
Or my kids will say something to me, even though they don’t live with me anymore, they’re grown, but I am that technology guy.
And so I get blamed for when it works well, and I get blamed for when it doesn’t work.
And the, the balance of technology pain versus technology joy in general has always been on the joy side.
And so being back with the Safari that makes me effective at my job, that allows me to do it as I like to do it at work, providing me the information and the tools that make me the most effective employee that I can be, is just something that has brought an immense amount of joy.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybitesatmerigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bites microcast.
And I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
