M1 Air vs M1 Mini for streaming device. Which do you use? Is 8GB enough?

[Gudi]

Does Apple verify Safrai extensions to make sure there is no malicious code? The only extension I've ever used is Adblock Plus, mainly because it's the most popular one. Other than that, I have no extensions installed on Chrome.

This Safari extension is distributed through Apple's official AppStore, so it probably survived some automated malware tests. Apple requires code signing by the programmer. This guarantees that the app hasn't been altered and Apple can quickly stop all apps of one specific programmer from working, if any one of them is found to act malicious. That's about as save as it gets.

EDIT: You can disable all extensions in the Safari preference panel before you start online banking.

 

[Mity]

EDIT: You can disable all extensions in the Safari preference panel before you start online banking.

This is exactly what I was alluding to. Thanks.

 

[ArkSingularity]

Web browsers are a use case where memory usage doesn't really matter all that much. You aren't actively viewing all of your tabs at once, so the OS can very easily just swap out most of the memory that is allocated with no negative impact on performance. The only downside is that there is a very slight delay when you revisit the tab, but this is maybe in the realm of 100 milliseconds or so at most.

I've run probably 80+ Chrome tabs at a time on my 8GB M1 and the computer feels snappy as ever, even with several gigs of swap usage. There was a time when Brave Browser had a memory leak that caused the GPU process to use several gigs of RAM, and I barely noticed because Mac OS did such a good job handling it. I do notice memory contention more when I'm doing XCode related stuff (opening the iOS simulator is painful), but web browsers seem to have no problem no matter what I throw at them.

Just my two cents from my experience.