safari ios memory limit

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Apple offers developers workaround for app RAM limits in iOS 15, iPadOS 15

Apple's iPad Pro models

Apple has always set a cap on how much RAM any one app can use on the iPad , but it's become more of an issue as the devices themselves physically include more. Even on an M1 iPad Pro with the current maximum 16GB RAM, apps have been limited to around 5GB each.

Now a new developer note regarding the beta releases of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 says that apps may request more RAM. It's done via a setting that seemingly does not let the apps specify how much more RAM they want, and Apple cautions that the feature will not be available on every iPad or iPhone .

"[It is a] Boolean value that indicates whether core features of your app may perform better with a higher memory limit on supported devices," says Apple. "If you use this entitlement, make sure your app still behaves correctly if additional memory isn't available."

Additional RAM may not be granted to a requesting app, based on total device capacity, or other apps using that RAM.

Apple provides a check that developers can use "to determine the amount of memory available." Perhaps giving a clue to why Apple imposes limits in the first place, the company also cautions that, "higher memory use can affect system performance."

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The problem: more available RAM makes developers lazy and wasteful with resources. But there are applications where the data sets themselves are huge, such as image data, DNA databases, audio/video recordings. Having such data memory mapped allows for more elegant algorithms and letting the OS (which is generally better at it) handle memory management. But that would require full-on virtual memory with paging and all; not sure that fits Apple’s iOS model… 

I think what some don't realize is that iOS has always allowed you to use virtual memory to use more memory than available ram using mmap() or NSData. Further the limit was 5GB of address space --not memory. So mmap() wouldn't help. It would simply fail when you ran out of address space. This is very different than not having enough memory to keep, say, your dataset resident.

I’m not sure I would describe this as a “workaround” any more than the Camera access API is a workaround for not having access to the camera… It’s a supported, documented feature of the operating system. 

With the speed of the latest SSD technology, memory swapping could be quite efficient. The PS5 SSD can read data at 5.5GB/s. Apple should be able to offload RAM to the SSD and load it again when needed without the user even noticing in most cases.

And another problem goes by the wayside. 

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• Oct 27, 2021

How to Build a Safari App Extension in iOS 15

iOS 15 finally introduced Safari extensions, one year after Apple brought extensions to Safari on the desktop. Of course, they did it in a very gated, Apple-like way, which makes the process to develop a Safari extension much more difficult than it needs to be. Notably however, you still can't make Chrome extensions on iOS (or Android).

A few weeks ago I set out to build a Safari extension for my app, hbd (you can check out the extension now in the latest update). I didn't find any thorough guides for this like I usually do for other development processes, so I decided to make one.

Let's talk about the practical details of building a Safari Extension on iOS.

Before Beginning

There are some important things to know before developing a Safari extension on iOS.

Extensions must have a containing native application. You can't just upload a Safari extension like you can on the Chrome web store, you have to build an iOS app too (even if it's just a shell for your extension), and go through the whole App Store review process to get it published.

Lots of browser APIs are restricted/unavailable . Most of this is due to the fact that iOS has much stricter memory limits than a computer, so they've added requirements like non-persistent background pages. Read the list to make sure you're not planning to use any restricted APIs.

Tabula Rasa

If you want to start from scratch, Xcode has a project template for Safari App Extensions. Create a new project, then select Safari Extension App. I recommend doing this just to see what the structure of the extension looks like, but I couldn't actually use this in my case, since I had an existing Xcode project that I wanted to add a new extension to.

If you already have an Xcode project, go to File->New->Target , and select Safari Extension (NOT Safari Extension App). Xcode will add a few boilerplate files in a new group:

SafariWebExtensionHandler.swift is the glue between your native app and the JS code. It implements the NSExtensionRequestHandling protocol, which allows it to receive and respond to messages from the JS.

the Resources/ folder contains all of your extension source code. This should be structured like an unpacked browser extension, with manifest.json at the top level.

The boilerplate JS files are okay if you're making a basic extension, but won't help very much if you're using a build system and framework like React, which I assume most complex extensions do. If so, you can delete all the files inside the Resources/ folder (we'll replace them later).

If you have an existing Chrome extension that you want to convert to Safari, you can run this command-line tool to convert it (I didn't use this since I was starting my extension from scratch).

Using React

I built my extension using React + Typescript. Coming from a background in Swift, I would highly recommend using Typescript over regular Javascript. If you use SwiftUI, I would also recommend using React. React has a lot of similarities to SwiftUI making it easy to pick up, although it's just a poor man's version of SwiftUI 😎. Here is the basic structure of my code:

If you use this boilerplate, run npm install after you've cloned it to download all the dependencies. Then, running npm run dev will build the extension and output it to the dist/ subdirectory. This dist/ directory is what we want to tell Xcode about.

Xcode - Groups & References

Xcode's file navigator (in the left pane) shows you a sort of pseudo-file structure of your project. I say pseudo- because it doesn't always represent what's actually stored on your hard drive. There are two ways to add new folders to an Xcode project - using groups or folder references.

If you add a group, new files added to that folder in your Finder don't automatically get added to your Xcode project. In Xcode 13, groups are represented with a gray folder icon.

If you add a folder reference, any new files added to that folder will automatically be added to your project. In Xcode 13, folder references are represented with a blue folder icon.

After researching this, I decided that using folder references is better than using groups. For example, if we add a new image to our extension's icons/ folder, we'd like that image to automatically be added to the Xcode project.

Here's how to accomplish this: No matter where you place your extension directory on your computer, you can open its dist/ subfolder and select all of the files, then drag them into the Resources/ folder in Xcode (NOT finder). Once you do this, a popup will appear:

Make sure you are not selecting Copy items if needed , and that you are selecting Create folder references. If you select copy items, then all of the files from your dist/ folder will be unlinked from your source code. So if you make some changes and rebuild your extension, those changes won't be included in Xcode.

If you open up the Resources/ folder in finder now, you will see that there are actually no files there. All of the files are actually stored in the dist/ folder in your extension directory, and are only referenced in Xcode and shown in the pseudo-file navigator. You can confirm this by opening the right pane (⌘⌥0) and looking at the file path for your JS files.

Unfortunately, we can't make the top-level Resources/ folder a folder reference in Xcode; it must be a group. This is a special folder name in Xcode and for some reason they won't let you change it to a folder reference. So if you add a new file to the top-level of your extension's dist/ folder (say you decide to add a new content script), you'll have to drag it into Xcode too. This is one change I would like Apple to make for future releases.

The Development Cycle

After you've set up the files, you can now start developing and testing your extension. The first step is to create a new scheme that runs your extension target:

Every time you run this scheme, it will ask you which app to launch; select Safari. There may be a way to set this automatically, but I haven't figured it out yet. Using this scheme, you can profile your Extension's memory usage and set breakpoints in your SafariWebExtensionHandler class.

SafariWebExtensionHandler.swift is responsible for handling all messages sent from the JS scripts. The app can only listen and respond to messages; it can't initiate messages to the JS on its own. To send messages to your app, you need to add the nativeMessaging permission in the manifest.json, and use this code :

You should send native messages sparingly, as I'll discuss later on. The main reason to use them would be to request necessary data from UserDefaults or a shared keychain.

Hot Reload?

Web developers are used to hot reload, but that won't quite work here. I used npm run watch to rebuild my extension every time I changed a file, but that will only change what is in the dist/ folder (which is referenced in Xcode). It won't push your new changes on the device you're testing. To do that, you need to re-run the project in Xcode. This is a painfully slow experience. As a sort of compromise, you can download the React Preview plugin for VS Code. It works sort of like the canvas in SwiftUI, but the layout doesn't always match up with mobile Safari, so be sure to test on device.

To debug your extension's JS scripts, you'll need to use Safari on your mac. Open Safari, enable the develop menu , then open the develop menu in the menu bar. Select whatever device you're running on, and select the relevant page, which will bring up a web inspector.

To my knowledge, there's no way to automatically open a web inspector when you open your popup page. I wish this were the case, since I spent a lot of time manually re-opening web inspectors. Also, every time you re-run your Xcode scheme, your breakpoints get cleared, which sucks. The lack of tooling here is what makes developing Safari Extensions a pain.

So you've tested your extension and its ready to go, now you just need to archive your project and upload it to App Store Connect. There's one small step that you might forget, which is to build your extension source for prod instead of dev mode. This dramatically reduces file size (in my case from 3.6 MB to 240 KB). In dev mode, Webpack includes a source map of your original, unbuilt code so you can debug more easily. If you've looked at your popup.js file inside your dist/ folder, it's a giant mess of unreadable code. Building for prod removes these source maps and minifies your code for production.

You can manually run " npm run build " to build for prod before you archive, or you can set up a script to do it automatically. I prefer the latter. Here's how to do it:

Edit your main app's scheme (not the extension scheme). Then, under Archive->Pre-actions , add a new Run Script Action.

Write your shell script. Make sure that "Provide build settings from" is set to your app target. There are a few things to note about the actual script:

I used the say command because I wasn't sure the script was actually running, so it helped debug.

Pre-actions aren't logged in the build log, so the second line redirects all output from this script to a file called prearchive.log in my main project directory.

Replace the path in line 4 with whatever path your extension is located at.

Now every time you archive your app, this script will run and automatically build your extension for production.

Other Challenges

iOS takes memory management seriously. As of iOS 15.0, the memory limit for a Safari Extension is 6 MB. This isn't documented anywhere to my knowledge, but you will discover it once your app is randomly terminated, as I did. This limit only refers swift code in your extension target, not JS/html/css. This seems like an incredibly unfair limit, given that running the template app in Xcode uses 3.8 MB (over 50% of the limit), and most of that is just Apple frameworks. According to one Apple employee on the Apple Dev forum , they're increasing the limit to 80 MB in iOS 15.1. If that's true, it's a 13x jump, which makes me think someone totally miscalculated and it somehow wasn't caught during beta. [Only real devices have this limit, simulators don't.]

Even if the limit is increased to 80 MB, I would try to use the SafariWebExtensionHandler as little as possible and do most of your work in the JS; the browser does not have the same strict memory limits. In my case, I needed to use native messaging to get the user's auth state from the shared keychain. Other than that, I used node modules and JS fetch requests to get all the data I needed.

It's trivial to ignore the safe area in a native app, but what about in Safari? Turns out Safari uses css environment variables to accomplish this. The only problem was that they didn't work for me. I tried a bunch of different things, like setting viewport-fit in a meta tag , but no matter what, the variables all evaluated to 0px. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but this whole approach is such a mess.

Other notes

In the documentation, Apple specifies to use the browser API namespace, but it seems that chrome APIs work just fine. Why?

Final thoughts

Many people say that the browser is a second-class citizen on iOS, and after developing a Safari extension, I understand why. There's a major lack of tooling here compared to native development. Granted, Safari Extensions are only a few months old.

Apple's strategy has generally been to push towards its native App Store, where it has much tighter control and can extract more value. The browser, on the other hand, is the wild west. For a while people thought that PWAs would be the next big thing, since they work cross-platform out of the box and are easier to deploy and maintain. But that never happened, since the UX of a PWA is still significantly worse than a native app. That must be at least somewhat intentional on Apple's part. Maybe they'll find a way to levy a 30% tax on all payments in Safari, too.

Anyway, the market for browser extensions has never been that big. Compared to the market for mobile apps, it's tiny. Browser extensions tend to be more like utilities (e.g. a password manager, ad blocker, theme provider), rather than full-blown applications. They're called "extensions" for a reason - they're meant to incrementally extend or enhance your browsing experience. The one notable winner here is Honey, a browser extension that got acquired for $4 billion (!) in 2019. I think there are a lot fewer opportunities to build standalone businesses around browser extensions, but they can make a great feature to complement your other apps. That's the approach I took with my app, hbd . (If you've made it to this far, please check out the hbd Safari extension!)

Anytime Apple introduces a user-facing framework like this, it's worth paying attention to. That's the beauty of developing for iOS - every year there are 3 or 4 totally new APIs that affect 1B people. I'm not super bullish on Safari extensions since I don't see any big opportunities, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an emergent viral Safari extension soon. So far, popular Safari extensions look a lot like regular chrome extensions, just ported to Safari. What can you do on iOS that you can't on desktop? What's different about how people use Safari on iOS? Whoever cleverly answers those questions will have a big opportunity on their hands.

If you have any comments, corrections, or improvements to my process, reach out to me at [email protected] and I'll be happy to update this post.

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Apps can request access to more RAM with iOS 15 entitlement, exceeding normal system memory limits

A newly documented entitlement will allow app developers to request privileged access to RAM on iOS and iPadOS. This system entitlement has existed in prior iOS versions as a private escape hatch, used by some internal processes.

The change from private to public means that third-party app developers will be able to take advantage of it where appropriate. This will be especially useful on the latest-generation iPad Pro with M1 chip, where available system RAM can reach 16 GB but the standard RAM-per-app limit is only 5 GB.

Per-app RAM limits have existed in iOS since the first release. Unlike the Mac, iOS does not swap memory with the disk when memory runs low. So, iOS has to carefully manage resources and developers must expect that their app can be ejected at any time.

However, some pro apps on the iPad in particular could benefit from being able to use more system resources than the average app. Recently, buyers of the new iPad Pro were surprised to find that the number of layers available in a Procreate canvas was the same regardless of whether they had purchased the 8 GB RAM or 16 GB RAM model. (This meant the only advantage to buying the higher-specced model was the ability to keep more apps in memory at the same time for multitasking purposes, rather than empowering a single application.)

This event highlighted how the maximum available RAM for an individual application on the M1 iPad Pro is only 5 GB, or less than a third of total physical RAM on the 1 TB or 2 TB iPad Pro models. Presumably with this entitlement, Procreate will be able to access significantly more than 5 GB of RAM and improve the customer experience.

The documentation for this entitlement does warn that access to additional memory is not guaranteed. It’s also currently unclear how much additional RAM will be granted, as the per-app RAM limits vary per iOS device.

Of course, most apps don’t have such high RAM requirements. This entitlement will be welcomed by pro media apps like image and video editors. Appropriate usage of entitlements falls under the purview of the App Review team.

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How can I limit Safari's RAM use?

Safari uses a lot of RAM. Especially when you add Safari's use to WebProcess's use: it comes to about 1.5 GB of memory (for me, anyway). How can I limit the amount of RAM Safari and WebProcess use?

I know a similar question was asked last summer, but two of those answers have to do with the program in question (Dropbox) and the other answer encourages use of Terminal, which I find terribly confusing. Are there any other methods?

• memory-limit

• Frustrated by the same problem, except with 3-4 GB rather than 1.5, I made the switch to Google Chrome a few months ago. I've long used Chrome on Windows, but preferred the native platform experience of Safari on OS X. Chrome's gotten very good at acting like a native app, and I've been happy with it. Subjectively, the UI feels more responsive than Safari, and they share the awesome WebKit rendering agent. Most importantly, I've had no trouble with memory leaks or freeze-ups. I hate restarting my browser, and I regularly leave tabs open for weeks. –  Cody Gray - on strike Apr 5, 2012 at 22:07
• @CodyGray I've actually migrated to Safari from Google Chrome—I don't have Flash installed except for Chrome's version, which saves system resources in general. When I want to use Flash, I just open it in Chrome! –  Tuesday Apr 5, 2012 at 22:20

Safari's excessive RAM usage limiting

By default, new windows and tabs in Safari are displayed in “Top Sites”, a 3×4 grid displaying those web sites visited most often with Safari.

'Top Sites' makes for a cute home page, but it will show sites one doesn't want showing up, and it will slow down Safari, especially on older computers. This ostensibly useful feature is loathed by quite a few users because it slows down Safari and the system.

While there is no easy and 100% safe way to turn 'TOP SITES' totally OFF, a few steps listed below will help Safari's performance and lessen excessive RAM use:

Stop Safari slowing and consuming extra RAM (as it visits all the websites listed in Top Sites) by removing any and all webpages from Safari's 'Favorites Bar' periodically (every week or so): Preferably, delete all webpages displayed within 'Top Sites':- Safari > History > Show Top Sites —> mouse-over each page (not regularly visited) so that the 'Delete-X' appears in the top-right corner, and click the 'X' — keep the iCloud page and the selected search engine for Safari, preferably Blekko (alt., DuckDuckGo, &c), if and only if regularly visited. Alternative method of deleting all the webpages within 'Top Sites':- Safari > Edit Bookmarks > Favorites Bar —> highlight all bookmarks and folders —> Edit > Delete.

In this way, Safari's WebProcess component (an integral part of Safari's Sandboxing functionality) won't keep pinging those sites to download data (just to provide Previews of those sites); it's a known bug - missing parts of PerformanceNavigation & PerformanceTiming in the WebKit2 component of WebProcess used by Safari.

• By how much did removing Top Sites reduce Safari memory usage? Safari is a memory hog for tons of reasons, and this is only one, and I suspect not a very major one. –  smci Oct 14, 2015 at 1:11
• And why would removing sites from the Favorites Bar change anything at all? Does WebProcess actually ping them? –  smci Oct 14, 2015 at 1:11

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iOS 15 Increases Memory Limit For Apps

Individual apps on iOS have previously been limited to 5GB each. This helps avoid sluggish system performance on lower-memory devices.

The 5GB limit has become an issue, though, with Apple Silicon delivering desktop-class performance on iPads and iPhones, and memory on the higher-end devices going up to 16GB.

Increased memory limits open the door for more resource-intensive applications, like complex audio and video editing.

In iOS 15, Apple has introduced a Property Key, com.apple.developer.kernel.increased-memory-limit, that is a Boolean value that indicates whether core features of your app may perform better with a higher memory limit on supported devices.

Developers can add this to their apps to inform the system that some of the app’s core features may perform better by exceeding the default app memory limit on supported devices.

Apple notes that developers should make sure their applications will work with the standard amount of memory, and can call the os_proc_available_memory function to determine the amount of memory available.

iOS 15 is now in beta and will be available as a free update this fall.

22 thoughts on “ iOS 15 Increases Memory Limit For Apps ”

What will be the first daw to port to iPad?

Bitwig. On a surface pro, the touch features are already there and not just a side-feature, its been thought through. Could be better with the selection wheel but its there. A joy to use with a touch screen.

we can only wish

Holy Expanded Memory Batman!! I won’t need to have memory space ….what a way to go! Bring it on Apple!! Apple bought out DC Comics….now I know why!

Apple considered it but they did not buy them. AT&T bought them, and then just announced a deal to get $43 billion for unloading WarnerMedia’s assets — including HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. – onto Discovery Inc., creating a new gigantic entertainment company. 😐 all hail the new overlords.

Yeah… Bitwig on a Surface is a great experience actually. And without any of the walled garden file shenanigan’s that come with an iPad. If you compare prices vs functionality (assuming you care to someday get your music onto a desktop computer for further work, publishing, archival, etc), the iPad is in the weaker position.

“If you compare prices vs functionality (assuming you care to someday get your music onto a desktop computer for further work, publishing, archival, etc), the iPad is in the weaker position.”

Yet the Surface kinda bombed and the iPad basically created a new category of devices.

Pundits and power users always want new tech to do what old devices do, because they’ve built up skill and knowledge on old devices.

You can really only understand new devices if you let go of your assumptions and pre-requisites. What if you getting your music onto a desktop computer for further work is not your main goal?

iOS is so much more powerful than a computer for capturing audio and video and publishing it to the web or the cloud. It’s better as an interface for virtual instruments and MIDI controllers. And it’s great as a cheap platform for capturing musical ideas.

Samplr is a fantastic example of how iOS has created new ways of interacting with sound that blow away previous approaches. Moog Model 15 is a fantastic experience on iPad.

With sales of $1.329 billion, I wouldn’t say the Surface bombed (source: Forbes). The Ipad is great, but I stopped counting the times I heard “why doesn’t it do this or that?” or “when is Apple going to release a Mac with a touchscreen?”.

You do realize that the revenue on iPads last quarter was over $8 billion, don’t you, and that it was an average quarter?

Yes I know the Ipad is way more popular, but that means in no way that Surface “bombed” as you claimed.

I still hope they do a 24 inch iPad someday.

When it was introduced, the Surface was covered in the PC press as an ‘iPad-killer’, so that may skew my take on it.

If you look at the Surface through the ‘iPad-killer’ lens, it clearly failed.

If you look at it as an alternate vision for touch computing, maybe it’s more successful at that. But the relatively low sales volume of the Surface seems to confirm Apple’s strategy of creating a multi-touch OS vs creating a ‘converged’ desktop computer with a touchscreen.

If you look at the Surface just on its own, it hasn’t really succeeded at being a money-maker for Microsoft, either. The company lost money on it for the first 6 or 7 years and it’s just now starting to be profitable. The Surface has probably been most successful at being a reference design for other Windows computer makers.

Garageband.

There’s Cubasis. With update 3.3 it gained a lot of useful features but it’s still not there yet. I pretty much gave up all hope that Apple really wants people to use the iPad like a lot of us want.

After spending thousands on iPads for a decade and the minimal features added in iPadOS15 it’s clear to say that Apple just wants you to buy a Mac if you wan’t anything ‘pro’.

Fortunately a Mac Mini M1 base model with 8GB RAM at €700/800,- or base model Macbook Air at €1000,- seems like a pretty sweet deal. (8GB should be enough for most people working with audio and plugins)

Just picked up a mac mini m1 8gb 2 days ago. It’ll fit the bill for what im using. Bitwig, plugins (Pigments, Fab Filter, a bunch of FX VST’s) VCV rack and misc other plugins that doesn’t consume too much CPU.

How does Bitwig do on an M1 with 8gb?

i have not made the jump to Apple Silicon macs yet. The M1 8gb is ridiculously powerful for the price, but I haven’t heard much about how media apps run on the M1 with 8gb. I considered 16gb to be minimum for doing media on Intel Macs.

No issues yet. I’ve ran it through the mud on my first run just to see, only bitnwig plug-ins and instruments. 100 tracks mixed with all the Bitwig instruments running multiple voices each. I don’t have an accurate count since I just picked, let’s say, polymer, then played chords in a 4 bar loop, rinse repeat. Set up modulators, and a few instances of poly grid. It didn’t break a sweat. I was reluctant to go 8gb but it was a difference between getting it in the store that day of waiting for a 16gb version in the mail. It’s held up nicely and I don’t think I make the kind of music that’s heavy on the CPU. Just wanted to try out what I saw from Nick Batt at sonic state with Logic Pro and an M1 8gb.

i wish there was bitwig for the ipad pro m1, or better, osx for ipad 🙂

Now Korg Gadget can have AUv3!

This also means that we need to go and buy new devices, since all but the most current one’s simply don’t have the RAM for this. Be sure to never update to ios 15 on anything older than an m1.

In case you didn’t read entire article: “ Apple notes that developers should make sure their applications will work with the standard amount of memory, and can call the os_proc_available_memory function to determine the amount of memory available.”

Or you could read the article your commenting on:

I think this is where iPads begin to take off on a whole new level. I’m going for a Mac Mini; that’s the form that works for me. Still, with just a few apps like SAMPLR & Garageband and Synthmaster having just been ported over, a lot of new doors are opening. The new Wakeman stack is slowly becoming 2 iPads, a standard keyboard controller and an MPE instrument. Unless you’re old enough to have eaten sh*t from dying floppy drives, you’re luckier than you know!

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Total canvas memory use exceeds the maximum limit - iOS 15 beta with Safari

With the latest iOS 15 beta releases we have started seeing issues with memory and canvases. This error is not reproduced in any of the earlier iOS versions (with any devices), it is only present in the new iOS 15 beta versions.

There are a couple of observations we've made:

• It seems it is more easily reproduced by repeatedly triggering the new url bar and rotating the device a lot.
• Clearing History and Website Data can fix the issue temporarily
• When it is reproduced it can easily be reproduced again, even when reloading the page.

So it seems we've found the solution to our problem.

What caused the issue in iOS 15 was that we created a object list with canvas elements as properties and store them to a local variable and later assigned it to the this context.

To explain we had a method, let's call it createAnimationList , which created and returned a list of objects which in turned contained a canvas element (deeper down in properties).

These items would after that be rendered to the canvas scene. Where the error happened was that we after that assigned it to the this context of the object which called the method from the beginning.

Next time this code was called the list created temporarily in animationList variable was kept in memory. What we did to fix this was add defensive coding to make sure createAnimationList wasn't called again. This might seem obvious looking at this simple example (the truth is a more complex obviously).

Something to think about is that our canvas elements was cache handled before with canvas.context.clearRect(0, 0, width, height) , canvas.context.setTransform(1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0) , and more. This cache clearing works for us in all versions earlier than iOS 15

HI @ evolutiongaming , i still dont understand how to fix this issue because i have exactly same issue with ipad pro and ios 15. Could you please explain to me how to fix this issue? thanks.

Hi @ evolutiongaming this seems to be issue even in newest betas, did your solution still works?

Related topics:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/684843

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/689071

Another topic related to Apples issue with latest ios 15 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/690924

9 months later, and still a problem. Can't seem to resolve it unless I restart Safari.

Your password

Ios safari and memory management.

Here’s what I don’t get about the iPhone’s Safari and memory management.

Safari will sometimes forget the website it has loaded and needs to reload them when you go to their tab. And they tell us that it’s because the iPhone has limited memory and when other apps need it, it has to free it. Unlike on the Mac, there is no virtual memory on the iPhone, so the system cannot automatically restore what was once removed from memory.

Okay, but why does Safari insist on keeping everything in memory? Why cannot Safari just save what it has downloaded to disk? My photos and videos don’t get destroyed when the phone is low on memory, why webpages should? Even if I opened a webpage a year ago, there is no reason on Earth to reload it from network when I want to look at it today. It’s already open, just show it to me! I didn’t press Reload, so please don’t do what you were not asked to.

I suspect it’s yet another corollary of general shittiness of modern browsers where developers are obsessed with JavaScript performance and security, and completely forget about being nice software .

IIRC, mobile Safari caches downloaded webpages and sometimes reloads them from storage. At least, I could open an old cached page in airplane mode, but not every page can be reloaded in this fashion.

Apple says: “Both OS X and iOS include a fully-integrated virtual memory system that you cannot turn off; it is always on.”

You say: “Unlike on the Mac, there is no virtual memory on the iPhone”

Where’d you get this information?

Hmm, that’s what I heard. Anyway, it’s not a good idea to store websites in memory when they are not being used.

iOS absolutely uses virtual memory; whether it swaps to disk (well, flash), and how *often* it swaps to disk, are a different story.

Total Canvas Memory Use Exceeds The Maximum Limit

You’re using the HTML Canvas Element in your new web app and decide to quickly test on iOS Safari. Suddenly your canvas isn’t drawn and the console shows a yellow warning “Total canvas memory use exceeds the maximum limit”. What gives?

While you were busy building, Safari was busy stuffing itself.

Safari has a thing for hoarding <canvas> elements. When you’re done with a canvas, Safari will hold on to it for a while, even if you’re not referencing it.

It has a cute little showcase where it presents all the canvas elements it’s currently holding on to.

That’s. Just. Great.

Safari on iOS has the same hobby. It desperatly wants to keep up with its big brother on MacOs but it just doesn’t have the same storage capacity.

Once the storage box is full, it’ll throw this message and start drawing transparent canvas elements.

So how do we deal with this?

We’re going to have to help out Safari to clean up its mess. Get rid of the things it can’t or won’t throw away.

When we’re done with a <canvas> element we have to manually “release” it.

Meaning we resize the canvas to a very small size and clear its contents, this tricks Safari in to replacing the canvas in its storage with our compressed version.

The following function will do just that.

Safari will still hold on to the <canvas> for a while, but at least now it won’t blow the roof of its storage depot.

Unfortunately the memory limit on iOS Safari is rather low. It’s limited to 384MB on version 15, it’s lower on earlier versions, and it’s probably device specific as well.

A canvas pixel is made up of 4 values, red, green, blue, and an alpha value. Combining this with the canvas size we can calculate the amount of memory a canvas requires.

4096 × 4096 × 4 = 67108864 Bytes = 64 Megabytes

This is also the max size of a canvas on Safari

Let’s exceed the 384MB limit by creating 8 of these canvas elements.

If the maximum limit was exceeded earlier the getContext('2d') method will return null so that’s why we check if the ctx variable is set before calling fillRect

When we add the releaseCanvas function we force Safari to free up some memory and the warning goes away.

What we should keep in mind is that Safari either:

• caches canvas elements across sessions
• or doesn’t recalculate the free memory correctly on page refresh

So a page refresh might not clean up the error immediately, it might still show and only dissapear after multiple refreshes or clearing the cache.

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Related articles

Canvas area exceeds the maximum limit, cross-browser alignment of the canvas filltext draw call, blocking navigation gestures on ios safari.

Coding for the long view

If I knew then what I know now…

Konva – Canvas limits in Safari IOS explainer.

Someone on the Konva Discord group had an issue loading a complex canvas on mobile via the Konva.Node.create() process. The app works fine on desktop but iPhone Safari is complaining about the canvas being too large. What gives?

This post is really a signpost to the good work in a couple of blog posts by Rick Schennink . I’m not going to cut & paste his work though I’ll give a quick description so you can recognise if you are in the same trap.

Canvas Area Exceeds The Maximum Limit

Rick’s description of this is

Safari simply cannot draw large canvas elements. The limit is set at 16.777.216 pixels. Create a canvas with more pixels and iOS Safari will tell us it exceeds the memory limit. Rick Schennink blog post

Head over to his blog post here for the full scoop.

Total Canvas Memory Use Exceeds The Maximum Limit

This is the second issue you might run into if you start using off-screen canvas (by which I mean a canvas you create yourself but do not display. The new offScreenCanvas API may also fall prey to this issue but Rick’s article was written before these existed I believe).

Rick says of this one

Safari has a thing for hoarding canvas elements. When you’re done with a canvas, Safari will hold on to it for a while, even if you’re not referencing it. Safari on iOS has the same hobby. It desperately wants to keep up with its big brother on MacOs but it just doesn’t have the same storage capacity. Once the storage box is full, it’ll throw this message and start drawing transparent canvas elements. Rick Schennink blog post

Again, head over to Rick’s post here to read the details and solution. I will copy the code of the solution below in case that blog ever goes away.

So – the solution is to always reset any temporary canvas that you created to have small dimensions and no content. Rick suggests this function as the way to do that.

For Konva we can use stage.destroyChildren( ) and stage.size({x:0, y: 0}) – other canvas libs probably have similar abilities.

We’ve seen that IOS has big ambitions but is cursed with more memory limitations than its big brother on MAC OS., and that this results in a relatively small limit on the overall canvas size and bear traps down the road if we don’t manage done-with-that-canvas instance disposal sensibly.

We’ve also seen the details the Rick provides, including an answer for the second issue.

Thanks for reading.

VW Feb 2024

Image by  Ashim D’Silva  at  Unspash.com

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About the security content of iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5

This document describes the security content of iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5.

About Apple security updates

For our customers' protection, Apple doesn't disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until an investigation has occurred and patches or releases are available. Recent releases are listed on the  Apple security releases page.

Apple security documents reference vulnerabilities by  CVE-ID  when possible.

For more information about security, see the  Apple Product Security  page.

iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5

Released May 13, 2024

Available for: iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2nd generation and later, iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 6th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later

Impact: An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges

Description: The issue was addressed with improved memory handling.

CVE-2024-27804: Meysam Firouzi (@R00tkitSMM)

AppleMobileFileIntegrity

Impact: An attacker may be able to access user data

Description: A logic issue was addressed with improved checks.

CVE-2024-27816: Mickey Jin (@patch1t)

AVEVideoEncoder

Impact: An app may be able to disclose kernel memory

CVE-2024-27841: an anonymous researcher

Impact: A malicious application may be able to determine a user's current location

Description: A privacy issue was addressed by moving sensitive data to a more secure location.

CVE-2024-27839: Alexander Heinrich, SEEMOO, TU Darmstadt (@Sn0wfreeze), and Shai Mishali (@freak4pc)

Impact: An attacker may be able to cause unexpected app termination or arbitrary code execution

CVE-2024-27818: pattern-f (@pattern_F_) of Ant Security Light-Year Lab

Impact: An app may be able to access protected user data

Description: A permissions issue was addressed by removing vulnerable code and adding additional checks.

CVE-2023-42893: an anonymous researcher

Impact: An app may be able to read sensitive location information

Description: A path handling issue was addressed with improved validation.

CVE-2024-27810: LFY@secsys of Fudan University

MarketplaceKit

Available for: iPhone XS and later

Impact: A maliciously crafted webpage may be able to distribute a script that tracks users on other webpages

Description: A privacy issue was addressed with improved client ID handling for alternative app marketplaces.

CVE-2024-27852: Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk of Mysk Inc. (@mysk_co)

Impact: An attacker with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access notes from the lock screen

Description: This issue was addressed through improved state management.

CVE-2024-27835: Andr.Ess

RemoteViewServices

Screenshots

Impact: An attacker with physical access may be able to share items from the lock screen

Description: A permissions issue was addressed with improved validation.

CVE-2024-27803: an anonymous researcher

Impact: A shortcut may output sensitive user data without consent

CVE-2024-27821: Kirin (@Pwnrin), zbleet, and Csaba Fitzl (@theevilbit) of Kandji

Sync Services

Impact: An app may be able to bypass Privacy preferences

Description: This issue was addressed with improved checks

CVE-2024-27847: Mickey Jin (@patch1t)

Voice Control

Impact: An attacker may be able to elevate privileges

Description: The issue was addressed with improved checks.

CVE-2024-27796: ajajfxhj

Impact: An attacker with arbitrary read and write capability may be able to bypass Pointer Authentication

WebKit Bugzilla: 272750 CVE-2024-27834: Manfred Paul (@_manfp) working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative

Additional recognition

We would like to acknowledge an anonymous researcher for their assistance.

We would like to acknowledge Adrian Cable for their assistance.

We would like to acknowledge Lucas Monteiro, Daniel Monteiro, and Felipe Monteiro for their assistance.

HearingCore

Managed Configuration

We would like to acknowledge 遥遥领先 (@晴天组织) for their assistance.

Safari Downloads

We would like to acknowledge Arsenii Kostromin (0x3c3e) for their assistance.

We would like to acknowledge Abhay Kailasia (@abhay_kailasia) of Lakshmi Narain College of Technology Bhopal for their assistance.

Information about products not manufactured by Apple, or independent websites not controlled or tested by Apple, is provided without recommendation or endorsement. Apple assumes no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance, or use of third-party websites or products. Apple makes no representations regarding third-party website accuracy or reliability. Contact the vendor for additional information.

Start a discussion in Apple Support Communities

Special Features

Vendor voice.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

M4 the m3 is barely six months old, and what about all those macs still stuck on the m2 when will they get some love.

Comment Apple seems to have skipped a few steps in its silicon roadmap.

The launch of Cupertino's M4 iPad Pro this week wasn't just met with backlash over another tone-deaf ad campaign , but left us with more questions than answers regarding the health of Apple's silicon portfolio.

For one, the "new" M3-series parts powering the iGiant's MacBooks and iMacs, announced at the Scary Fast event last Halloween, haven't even celebrated their first birthday. What's more, the Mac Mini, Studio, and Pro models are still rocking older M2-series processors, with the M2 Ultra still technically the top-specced part in the lineup.

We hadn't exactly expected to see the M3 Ultra make its appearance until WWDC in June, and I think we can all agree the Mac Mini is well overdue for a refresh – its design dates back to 2010.

With the launch of M4 this week, we're left wondering whether an M3 Ultra will ever materialize, or if Cook and Co will jump straight to the M4. There's some precedent to suggest this could happen: the iMac never received an M2 refresh, jumping straight from the M1 to M3.

What we know about the M4 so far

The M4 launching alongside the refreshed iPad Pro offers a number of material improvements over the M3. Most notably, it's using a second-gen 3nm manufacturing process from TSMC. It adds two additional efficiency cores, bringing the total up to 10, and boosts the neural processing unit – or as Apple prefers, Neural Engine – performance to 38 TOPS of machine learning grunt.

If Apple's performance claims are anything to go by – and do take them with a grain of salt – the new chip's CPU is 50 percent faster than the M2 and its GPU is as much as 4x faster.

It's just too bad all that performance is trapped inside of an iPad, where you'll be hard pressed to find any applications that'll really stretch the M4's legs. As the owner of an M2 iPad Pro, this vulture can tell you with complete confidence the last thing Apple's tablets needed was higher performance.

Perhaps the most notable improvement – and the one we highlighted in our day-one coverage – was the M4's upgraded NPU. It's a big improvement over the 18 TOPS of the M3. What we still don't know is at what precision that spec is achieved. If we had to guess it's probably 8-bit.

While Apple has been shipping NPUs in its chips going back to the A11 in 2017, the tech has become a must-have for rivals Intel and AMD, as they scramble to enable the AI apps that make a computer an AI PC.

That 38 TOPS figure is also significant, as it is substantially higher than the 16 TOPS claimed by AMD's Ryzen 8040-series parts or the 10 TOPS of which Intel's Meteor Lake chips are capable. Intel has said the NPU in its Lunar Lake parts will touch 45 TOPS – but those won't hit the market until later this year. Qualcomm's X Elite parts, due out later this year, will boast 45 TOPS NPU as well.

For the record, you don't need an NPU to run an AI chatbot at home. We have a whole guide for running models like Llama2 or Mistral-7B on your CPU or GPU, which you can find here . Instead, the interest around NPUs centers on enabling AI functionality without compromising on thermals, performance, or battery life.

Another important improvement Apple claims is a boost to the chip's memory bandwidth. As we've discussed in the past, memory bandwidth is a major bottleneck when it comes to running models. In many cases, AI model performance is limited more by the speed of the memory than by FLOPS or OPS. This is why we've seen GPU makers pushing for faster and higher density HBM configurations in the datacenter – but the same applies to running AI models on consumer electronics.

And while not mentioned in Apple's marketing materials, netizens digging through Apple's Xcode 15.4 release candidate found references to Arm's Scalable Matrix Extensions (SME), which should also help to speed up machine learning workloads.

So what happened?

There's a lot that we still don't know and probably won't know until the M4 makes its way to the Mac. But that doesn't mean we don't have our theories about why Apple pushed the chip out so quickly after the M3.

Some have speculated that the move to TSMC's second-gen 3nm process tech may have necessitated a redesign on Apple's part. This may well be true. But as one of TSMC's hero customers, Apple would have been made aware of this very early on. Remember, designing a chip does not happen overnight and is an incredibly expensive endeavor – especially on bleeding-edge process nodes like we're talking about here.

As such, we don't find this to be all that satisfying an explanation. Knowing this was coming, why would Apple launch the M3 and M4 in such quick succession? I guess we'll have to wait until WWDC and see if the M3 Ultra makes an appearance, or if Apple opts to jump to the M4 Pro/Max/Ultra across the board over the course of the year.

Another possibility has to do with a particularly nasty vulnerability recently uncovered in Apple's current crop of SoCs. The bug, dubbed GoFetch, exploits the use of data memory-dependent prefetchers (DMPs) to leak cryptographic keys. We've got a full write up on GoFetch, which you can find here . DMP can be disabled on the M3, but as researchers pointed out, doing so will likely degrade performance significantly.

It's not clear whether the M4 offers any hardware level mitigations to the GoFetch vulnerability – the development timelines for these kinds of chips would suggest not – but we can't rule it out.

• Fedora Asahi Remix 40 served on Apple Silicon

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Add ai servers to the list of idevices apple silicon could soon power, apple unveils m4 chip with neural engine capable of 38 tops, and some other kit.

The more likely reason is that Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm's next-gen chips may have Apple worried. To be clear, a look through the Geekbench browser shows that the M3 – along with its Pro and Max siblings – is still a very competitive little chip. However, CEO Tim Cook now has investors breathing down his neck wondering how he missed the boat on this whole AI thing.

In the past, the metrics folks cared about were single and multi-core CPU and GPU performance. In the AI age, all anyone wants to hear about – well the investors anyway; we suspect the average Joe couldn't care less – is FLOPS and OPS.

As we mentioned before, NPU performance has become the metric to beat in the AI PC arena, where Microsoft has set a target of 40 TOPS. Obviously, Apple isn't beholden to this mark. It can decide for itself what a good target is.

But Apple's failure to compete on this metric could lead to AI app developers prioritizing Windows devices over Macs, which could end up making the aluminum-clad systems less attractive to consumers. That not only means smaller profits from device sales, but less app revenue too – which we're sure will really get investors' blood boiling.

As for those weighing an Apple Silicon Mac, the best advice we can give is to wait. Worst-case scenario, the M4 ends up being a marginal upgrade over the M3 with much of the advantage weighted toward AI apps – which you may or may not care about at this point. If that happens, history tells us you'll be able to pick up a last-gen Mac at a pretty steep discount. ®

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