Apple is a few days away from shipping its next big update to its desktop operating system, but people running its current and previous macOS releases can already benefit from one of macOS High Sierra’s components.
Yes, I’m writing something nice about Safari for a change.
The browser that I’ve spent much of the past few years cursing at for its weak memory management and general inability to let me run the computer instead of the other way around got a welcome, pre-High Sierra update Tuesday.
The most talked-about feature in Safari 11.0 may have been its ability to automatically silence sites that without invitation play videos with audio on (yes, I know that includes some of my freelance clients), followed by its blocking of cross-site ad tracking. But the option I’m enjoying most at the moment is Safari 11’s ability–stashed in a new “Websites” tab of its preferences window–to open every page at a given site in the minimalist Reader view.
Where ad blockers are often clumsy and random, Reader can be an elegant weapon against sites that demand attention with junky ads and auto-playing media. It might also spare you from a particularly piggy page locking up your Mac with a demand for more memory than the system can allocate.
“Isn’t that the system’s damn job,” you say? Yes, it is. Fortunately, Safari 11 also now seems able to quash a site in the middle of a memory binge, to judge from the banner I saw atop a page advising me that Safari had reloaded it “because it was using significant memory.”
I’m not going to tell the Safari developers to kick back with a nice vacation – since this update, the browser has already forced a reboot when it somehow refused to restart or fully quit–only a week after I’d had to go through the same routine with Google’s Chrome. But at least I don’t feel like this app is conspiring against me.
Rob Pegoraro 