I create periodic CSV password backups on the Macs that I manage. After the recent 1Password story, I was feeling good that at least I shouldn’t have to worry about the Passwords app not launching. But it turns out that, today, Apple’s app didn’t work, either.
After telling it to export everything (except the passkeys, which are not exportable), it asked for the user’s password twice but then failed to save the file or report an error. This happened several times. I saw some vague CloudKit errors in Console, but it wasn’t clear they were related to the export. And shouldn’t it be able to export the locally stored data without going to the cloud?
Then I noticed that the passwords in the app were stale—the last modification was more than a month ago. Had it stopped syncing with iCloud Keychain? I could find no indication of that in Passwords or in System Settings, though it’s not as if there’s an easily accessible sync status indicator or log.
I tried the all-purpose remedy: signing out of iCloud. This made things worse because when I signed back in it wouldn’t accept any device passwords, even though I’m sure that I entered three different ones correctly. It kept saying:
Verification Failed
There was an error verifying the passcode of your iPhone.
Now I was stuck with the dreaded “Some iCloud Data Isn’t Syncing” error in System Settings, with no access to any end-to-end encrypted data. (I’d been almost ready to enable to iCloud Advanced Data Protection, but now I wonder whether that’s a bad idea because it increases the likelihood of a bug or server problem locking me out of my own data.) Exporting from Passwords still failed without reporting an error. And, because I had to sign out of iCloud in order to sign out of iCloud Keychain, I now had 80K photos that needed to be redownloaded.
I thought maybe there was a temporary server glitch. Of course, the iCloud status page showed nothing. I waited a few hours and tried again, but it still didn’t accept my device passwords.
What finally worked was reinstalling macOS. That allowed me to fully sign into iCloud, passwords started syncing again, and exporting suddenly worked.
Previously:
Apple Password Manager Backup Bug CSV iCloud iCloud Advanced Data Protection iCloud Keychain Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Passkeys Syncing
Chance Miller (Hacker News):
Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos, Apple wants everyone to know Safari is “a more powerful and private browser than Chrome.”
Apple (Hacker News):
Safari offers up to 5 hours more video streaming on your Mac compared with Chrome.
[…]
Faster page loads on frequently visited sites when browsing on Mac.
Lex Friedman:
Apple then uses some iffy animations to promote its claims that “Safari cuts the clutter while Chrome piles it on”. (I don’t think this one’s fair. Chrome doesn’t add extra crap to websites, in my experience.)
I’m fine with Apple’s claim that “Safari shields you while Chrome reveals you,” though internal rhyme is never my favorite.
Then the next one says “Safari blazes; Chrome cruises.” I don’t think those are opposites, and the rabbit with a snail shell is a weird image to me. And even Apple’s explainer text — “Safari is up to 35% faster than Chrome when loading frequently visited sites on Mac” — feels heavily caveated.
There are so many things about this page that seem weird to me.
I still use Safari because I prefer its interface. But I wish I could find something better so I could switch away from Safari:
It’s been crapping out, for lack of a better term, for at least five years now. That is, sometimes it will stop being able to load pages, and I have to restart the app—or sometimes even the Mac. The latter has never happened to me with any other browser.
Marketing claims aside, it feels slower to me. Maybe the average is better, or something, but what I notice is the sluggishness of certain Web apps and pages with lots of JavaScript or many resources.
Sometimes long pages that load via JavaScript as you keep scrolling just stop loading more content. This happens in other browsers, too, but it seems to happen sooner and more often in Safari.
It seems to perform worse than Chrome with large numbers of tabs.
I still run into non-obscure pages that don’t work in Safari but do work in both Chrome and Firefox.
I don’t like the way it handles private windows, where you can’t just open a link in a new tab because it will no longer be logged in.
It creates quarantined .webloc files.
Anonymous:
I’d be more supportive of this if Apple would actually port Safari to Windows again, or even make new ports to Android and Linux! As is, however, it sort of feels kinda desperate. Chrome is mentioned so many times on that page, which doesn’t look bad until one compares it to their other currently-running campaigns like Mac does that. (Switch to Mac) where Windows is only mentioned a couple times (PC gets twice that amount), or even Switch to iPhone where Android is only mentioned once!
Previously:
Google Chrome Mac macOS 27 Golden Gate Marketing Safari Web Browser
Jeff Johnson (Reddit):
Opening a webloc file, for example by double-clicking in Finder, now triggers a Gatekeeper alert in the latest versions of macOS Golden Gate and Tahoe, 27.2 and 26.7.2 respectively, though oddly not in macOS Sequoia 15.8.2.
[…]
I could not find anything relevant in the macOS 27.2 security release notes, but the document is extremely long and each entry terse, in typical Apple fashion.
I’ve seen this occasionally, over the years, with Web archives and downloaded PDF files, but now it seems to happen with every bookmark file. I’m not sure what the point of it is. These are not even downloaded files; they’re created by the user dragging a link, so presumably it’s not a surprise what the file contains. And if it is a surprise, the alert doesn’t help because it doesn’t show you a preview of the URL that would be opened. A malicious URL would probably hide anything suspicious behind a redirect, anyway.
So how is this actionable? What is the story where Apple thinks a user will accidentally end up with a bad .webloc file and be dissuaded from opening it by this alert? It just seems like pointless friction.
All that opening the file does is open the URL in Safari, which is the same thing that would have happened had you clicked the link in the browser window. What’s next—warnings for those clicks, too? They could market it as a reason to Switch to Safari.
Previously:
Bookmarks Gatekeeper Mac macOS 27 Golden Gate macOS Tahoe 26 Safari URL
