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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.