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Mac OS X Lion Has a Browser-Only Mode
dkd903 writes "It turns out that there is a feature in OS X Lion which no one expected and was never announced at WWDC. The feature we are talking about is 'Restart to Safari.' As you might have guessed from the name, this feature makes it possible to restart the Mac into just the Safari browser and nothing else."
If the restart isn't instantaneous (i.e., if there isn't an instant-on-to-browser mode built in) then this would seem to be a means of sandboxing a machine, as for use as a public kiosk type of terminal.
In which case the question is of course how to get back to a fully-functional shell, if, say, you lose your keys, or sump'n like dat.
Apple didn't even mention it. At all. It isn't stated anywhere on Lion's feature page and has only been discovered by users testing preview versions. Nice try at a negative spin though.
It's likely this could be great for Kiosks and a more bare-bones Guest login
I didn't realize Windows was a business.
The answer to the question "why is Microsoft still in business?" is because Apple doesn't license its operating system to OEMs. Apple is a hardware company, and they want you to buy their stuff. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's the reason Macs have the reputation of just working. Restrict the hardware you have to support to a very limited range and you can work out all the bugs.
Microsoft, however, allows any Joe Dirt to buy OEM licenses and install on any homebuilt computer. And so we have the great trade-off: Monopoly on hardware and higher unit prices, but fewer bugs vs. Competition from different manufacturers and lower prices, but more bugs and security issues.
Most people go for the lower priced computer.
Disclaimer: I own a MacBook Pro and various home-built desktops
The fact that Apple and/or its faithful manage to make a big deal out of every 20 year old idea is not "negative spin". Whether it's Apple itself knowing how to drum up good PR or just insufferable fanboys preaching the word, it makes the Mac community a painful one to be around.
I've "switched to Mac" three times in my life and switched back again within a couple of years, each time leaving with a bad taste in my mouth: the first was with a Mac Plus, as the alternatives had already played and won catch-up; the second time with a PowerMac 8600 and G3 Wallstreet, as I seemed to have got in with the most religious thick-headed user group I've ever had the misfortune to encounter; the last time was with a white iMac C2D (the "educational" edition with the awesomely powerful GMA950), which managed to enter partly unsupported status before I'd even reached my third year of AppleCare and which by the last 6 months I was mostly only using in Windows 7 - everything I wanted to do in OS X I could do on Windows 7, and then I can do so much more.
I bet I'll try Mac a fourth time though, given another half decade of rest and recovery. And I still love my Mac Plus.
I must be some sort of masochist.
Actually... Apple did mention as part of "Find My Mac":
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/07/os-x-lion-developer-preview-4-adds-find-my-mac/
The idea has three purposes:
1. Guest Access (as has been pointed out here)
2. Recovery. If you hose up your HD it may be possible to troubleshoot using this browser. It actually boots from a "recovery partition"... so your actual OSX installation doesn't even need to work.
3. Finding a stolen / lost machine. The idea is that if someone picks up your machine and tries to use it.... they might use this browser mode for a while allowing "Find my Mac" to phone home and show the coordinates of the machine.
That last one seems dodgy to me.... but that's the rumor going around the Mac sites.
Personally, I think Guest Access is a great idea. If I know I'm going to have people over to my house all evening (maybe to watch football)... I can leave a laptop around in this mode for anyone to use all evening... without fear that they are getting into my personal stuff.
One final note: This is only enabled after downloading the iCloud installer to go with Lion preview.... just in case anyone else out there is trying to figure out how to use it.
Suspend to RAM generally brings the power draw down to a few watts, even on extremely high-power machines. After all, it's only powering the RAM, and then only enough for a periodic refresh. Probably just a dozen watts, max.
Suspend to disk is even better - brings power draw to zero. Or at least as close as possible - we shouldn't be counting standby power here, since that's there after a full shutdown, too. And, while not quite as fast to restart as restore from RAM, restore from disk is still usually faster than a full boot sequence.
My homebuilt Windows 7 machine has been a far smoother experience than my store-built iMac. The latter was pretty smooth on Tiger, to be sure, but Leopard onward was glitchy. I'm really not sure that Apple do too much testing on their previous generation hardware.
And I'd rather have 14 years of reasonable support - thank you, XP - than 2-3 years of slightly better.
A computer uses anywhere from 5W when "turned off". A few W more when STR, maybe 7W. It's from the standby power lead.
At $0.10/kWh, 7W for 18h/day, this works out to about $4.60/year/computer. So if you have 1000 computers, this gets you at least $4600 in savings if you have a policy of a real shutdown of a computer (ie. a switch that cuts power to computer)
And if you have 1000 iMac computers, you're wasting $50 or more a night as a sysadmin walks around the floor turning them on by hand for system updates, software installs, and virus scans, cursing dumb power policies, and Apple (for not having a real WOL).
I don't understand.
because not everyone is stupid enough to see executing the browser instead of the shell as a great new feature
These days, it is nearly impossible to find a computer that doesn't support suspend to ram properly. Do people really shut down their computers so often that this feature would actually be useful? I just don't understand it.
Four reasons:
1. Security-- Using whole disk encryption, the machine is well-secured when completely powered off. When on, the key is in RAM and the disk is accessible. This also goes for services that are running.
2. Energy savings-- Why keep a machine using energy, even a few watts, if that adds up to something over the life of the machine?
3. SSD-- My computer boots and halts in about fifteen and five seconds, respectively, only slightly longer than the resume from hibernate.
4. Freshness-- Though rarely an issue, there's nothing like starting with a clean slate each day. No stray processes, memory leaks (FF v4) or conflicts.
You can still directly into any X app if you want.
I just checked and ">console" login still works on Snow Leopard.
1) Edit login options to display the login window as "Name and password"
2) Logout of all accounts and login with the username ">console"
3) Enjoy your Darwin shell.
It's not much different at all than the Linux shell. If you install Gnome, XFCE, KDE, etc. You can launch them with startx. If you want to boot straight into another application edit your startx scripts (.xinitrc, etc).
I'm sure you can compile Chrome, Firefox, and the like to not use Aqua and just the X11 libraries.
Sounds like she needs an iPad and an external keyboard.
Been there, aunt is happy.
The point of boot to browser mode is to have simple guest access to computer. Someone wants to check their mail, browse the web etc. you can now do that without allowing local access to guest account, or allowing someone else to use your account/browser with all your saved passwords and porn browsing preferences.
Guest account gets access to a lot more than browser, and this nicely restricts them to only one application (and most useful one at that). Also, none of the browsing history is saved, so nothing survives to the next person getting into the browser mode.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
When I originally read about this, it was mentioned that this feature was in fact a honeypot to encourage a thief to plug the machine into the internet. After all, for many people all they want to do is get online anyway. Thief plugs it in, the Find My Mac stuff is able to connect and send information back to the owner who can contact the authorities. Farther evidence of this was that it's a guest account, you're not able to enable it for your own user account (I haven't personally used it, so I can't confirm).
It was also mentioned that this browser would throw out realistic looking errors for some sites, even if the site was actually fine.
Because it's by far the most functional, open, well-supported, cost-effective desktop computing environment in the world. While other offerings have some of these features in greater measure (Linux - openness would be the obvious one), no other choice has an adequate measure of them all.
Which of the things listed does the Mac *not* have in "adequate measure"? And it's far from clear that Windows is "by far" ahead of the Mac across those areas you listed.
Windows is "still in business" because it established itself as the default choice almost two decades ago. The PC and Windows were *much* better suited for business use at the time, and business decisions drove the market. People wanted to have the same system at home as they had at the office.
For the past 5 years, Mac growth has outpaced PC growth. Increasingly, consumers, and even businesses, are more and more buying Macs. There are really only two things holding Mac sales back today: higher than average entry-level price (specifically, that Apple doesn't cater to the low end), and inertia.
Apple is overcoming Windows' inertia just fine. Clearly, people aren't as in agreement with your assessment as you seem to think they are.
Suspend to disk has nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with drivers. From the hardware's perspective, resuming from disk is no different than a cold boot. It's up to the OS to reload the memory contents and initialize hardware back to pre-suspend state.
With the right programming, you could use S2D on an ancient 286 PC. There was a popular game cheating TSR that did just that, to provide "save anywhere" functionality in just about any DOS game. On top of memory dump/restore, it also managed state for a few sound cards like the SB16/Pro and GUS. I can't remember if it was Pro Action Replay or another, but it was pretty big back then.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I've thought for years that windows should have a 'boot to Outlook' feature for executives; allow the entire available space of the drive to be used for indexed email storage to avoid having to decide which emails to delete, and load office programs by clicking on attachments, but don't confuse them with any other interface than just Outlook.
And optionally support rebooting by holding it upside down and shaking.
ch
memory.
there are literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code that go into me being able to type a single character on this message box and have it go through the internet and show up on slashdot.
until every system in the entire planet moves to some magical language where nothing ever leaks, on all levels from assembler hardware drivers to the lower level libraries to the UI layer to the drivers for video cards to the 3rd party programs we all use like Chrome or Firefox,
then there will always be memory leaks
intimidation, political maneuvering, invasion of the k-12 school system, and soon, predatory litigtation (especially patent litigation)
They sit around for 23 hours a day because they CAN. They cover all of their survival needs in 1 hour a day. That's not lazy. That's efficient. U jelly.
My Mac eats small children too. OS X Lion is fitting.
Ignoring the OS X virus debate, no one I know in IT or otherwise has ever seriously performed a virus scan on OS X in the way one regularly does on Windows. I'm sure there are fringe incidents but my point stands; running virus scans on an iMac is not a standard day to day job of a systems administrator.
only to find that there's an update but it's been patiently waiting to restart to install the update.
You are right. That stupid icon in the top right corner of the Chrome window indicating there is an update pending should be replaced. Obviously Google should implement one of those popups so that you can immediately interrupt your work to update your browser. Or better yet they could automatically restart your browser while you are surfing. This way everyone will always have the latest and greatest version.
Obviously, some people on the Chrome team don't use Macs.
I can keep Chrome open for weeks on Windows and on Linux too, that's nothing special.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Not legally you can't. And also - it only works properly on an extremely limited hardware subset. I've hackintoshed 2 different machines (neither with exotic hardware - just onboard nic, sb x-fi, nvidia) and getting everything working on boot is a pain in the arse.
If you're talking about running on a real mac, certainly.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
And if you read the license, you're not permitted to run it on non-apple hardware.
And the license clause may or may not be valid according to your local laws (consumer, contract etc.).
In some jurisdictions post-sale conditions are not necessarily enforcable, and the license would only be valid if you were required to read and sign it before/at time of purchase. In other jurisdictions your right to use something you have bought** however you wish*** may take precedence. As Apple has shown no inclination to take individual purchasers**** to court for running OS X on non-Apple hardware, it may well be that even they have doubts about this clause's enforceability.
**This includes something which is conducted as if it was a sale even if Apple claims you didn't really buy but licensed.
***However you wish - subject to basic copyright law etc. (but not necessarily subject to Apple's additional license conditions).
****Apple vs Psystar raised some different issues and does not directly bear upon an indivdual purchaser's rights to use OS X on their own hardware.
To summarize: Just because Apple says something is so this does not make it the law.
The driver combinations shouldn't matter. If each driver just properly re-initializes the hardware it is responsible for, everything should work well.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Feel free to find a laptop (without a crippled "home" OS) that has the same specs as a MacBook for $600 less than.
Very few people want a laptop with "the same specs as a MacBook", though - many laptop buyers are happy with less and some need more, but only a tiny number want that precise specification and set of features.