You learn something new every day, I didn’t actually realize that this was now built into the Mac OS, as I have always used A Better Finder Rename (and awesome app with more power than this, but it costs $22.95 unlike this tip but if you do check it out also check out A Better Finder Attribute it’s companion app).
Now I am running the new Safari within Big Sur in the Safari Technology Preview, and I am on an iMac Pro with a second 27″ monitor, so 2 27″ monitors running at 2560×1440. To me the new safari is only trying to save space, but doing it at the cost of usability.
This is current safari’s bar with 3 tabsAnd Monterey’s Safari with 3 tabs, you already lose the title of the web site.Current safari with 9 tabsMonterey with 9 tabs, much less legible and even worse with no ICO filesBig Sur Safari with 15 tabsMonterey with 15 tabs, already you can see tabs stacking on top of each otherAnd 18 tabs in Big Sur Safari
The tabs in Monterey become illegible and hard to find too quickly and all so the tab bar can take up less space. All well and good for a small screened laptops users, but useless for large displays! And even more useless for power users who have lots of plug ins which also take up space!
And you can’t even activate the old functionality in Safari, only the new tabs are available.
And this is Firefox with Tree Style tabs. They are always legible and you can have so many of them. Once again, maybe not so good for a small laptop, but for a big monitor it is essential. If only firefox would have a true dark mode and allow me to get rid of the light title bar at the top, but at least it means you can read the web site title. Still I wish I could turn the top tabs off and just have tree style tabs.
Of course there is also Vivaldi, which has tree style tabs built in. It is a gorgeous and fast browser, built on chrome, while I would prefer Firefox for it being a different engine and the most customizable browser.
And that isn’t even the worst of it. If you have Safari at default settings, when you switch tabs you get the tabs changing color based on the web site. For some web sites, it isn’t so bad, but for others…
Look how it changes, especially when it hits BBC news, this is completely distracting.
Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.
Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.
I know this site is usually very negative on the coverage of Mac OS upgrades, but the upgrades do seem to add more problems than they add, and usually add hits to performance.
And I have personally held off on the upgrade to Big Sur, though I really do need the Thunderbolt hub support so I can have more drives connected than I currently do.
Of course I also can’t upgrade because where I am currently working refuses to upgrade past Adobe Creative Cloud 2019, and that version does not work on Big Sur, you need to run at least 2020 to run on Big Sur. Now when the built in Speech to Text comes out of Beta maybe I can upgrade, though I might as well hold off for now.
But Apple keeps sending me Updates Available, but the only available update is for Garage Band, which the update only works in Big Sur. I know they want me to move to Big Sur, but I literally can’t.
And the reasons I can’t just update to Big Sur are many. First off Catalina is running very well right now, but also I am on a job that uses Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 13.1.5, and I haven’t seen anything that shows that it runs in Big Sur. And while I would rather move to a newer version, that is what they are running at the company.
And it already has the Final Release of the SoftRaid Version 6 Driver included, so a RAID should be fully supported.
SoftRaid is mandatory for a RAID on a mac, so I could not be more happy about this.
And they are working on M1 support, but it obviously couldn’t be out with development Macs as they didn’t include thunderbolt ports, so you couldn’t test thunderbolt connectivity, but are working on it now.
So Apple will soon be making it’s own processors, and the next OS Big Sur supports it, but the jump to arm also comes with a change from CISC processors to RISC processors. Now Apple has updated Xcode to help software run easily and the transition is stated to not be very hard, but my question is with PCI expansion.
The MacPro’s claim to fame is it’s expansion capabilities, and that involves PCI cards. PCI card rely on much more system level drivers to get them to work, and the move from CISC to RISC will obviously mean that they are programmed differently, but to even attempt to program them developers will need hardware that has PCI slots so they can run them. The Development kit doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, so PCI support if it ever comes, may be buggy for a very long time, because how can developers even attempt to support the new hardware without having something to use to develop it on?
We are likely at least 2 years away from seeing what the high end Mac will be on Apple Silicon, and we see if PCI will even exist for it, and even if it does it may be a long haul from them to get working drivers.
Sometimes I just wish Apple was a little more transparent.
So when Apple showed off it’s new Apple Silicon chip it showed it running on what looked like Apple’s new 6K Pro Display XDR monitor in the 2020 WWDC Keynote.
That was what they showed Maya running on, and they claimed that they were running on the Apple Silicon Transition Kit, but there is a problem there.
The Transition Kit does not in fact support Thunderbolt, which is a licensed Intel Technology. So either they were running on different hardware from the transition kit, or they have hacked or new versions of the monitor capable of running off of USB C.
Either way Apple was fudging the truth a bit here.
Honestly they should have figured out a way to include Thunderbolt 3. They have previously bet so much on the technology, and if they drop it WILL HAVE HUGE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PRO MARKET.
