OS X 10.7.3 is huge, but what's in it?

Have you downloaded OS X 10.7.3 for your Apple Mac yet? If you haven't, let me warn you that it is a huge update. It is a humungous 1.34Gb, which has to be a third to half the operating system when you compare it to the size of the download when you get Lion from the Mac App Store. It makes you wonder what is in it doesn't it?

There is a page at the Apple website that lists all that is new in 10.7.3, but it is hard to see how it requires 1.34Gb. It seems to contain a lot of little bug fixes, some of which you may have come across, but others you won't. It contains Safari 5.1.3 and browser upgrades are always useful though.

Somewhat irritatingly, the update adds support for a collection of foreign languages you don't use. Couldn't foreign language support be an option? What is the point of OS X 10.7.3 adding Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian language support to my Mac when you don't use any of them?

You could always download the latest version of Monolingual and delete all those languages. The software doesn't say that it works with OS X Lion, only OS X up to Snow Leopard, but many people have tried it and report that it works fine. Some users say they have removed over 1Gb of foreign language files from their Mac. (Many applications contain foreign language support files, so it's not just OS X.)

A bunch of security updates are included in OS X 10.7.3 and you can see them here. When you think of security problems, you automatically think of Windows and how insecure it is, but if you read the security fixes listed in the Apple document it shows that the Mac has lots of security issues itself. For example, 10.7.3 fixes "Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information," also "Viewing a maliciously crafted image... may lead to...  arbitrary code execution," and "Playing maliciously crafted audio content may lead to... arbitrary code execution," and "Viewing a maliciously crafted movie file may lead to... arbitrary code execution," and so on.

Basically, websites, images, music, movies and documents can all cause code, possibly malicious, to be executed on the Mac. This is just the tip of the iceberg and the page listing the security updates is long and detailed. It appears that the bulk of the 1.34Gb OS X 10.7.3 update is Apple fixing a large number of serious security flaws. Despite its large size, it is therefore well worth downloading and installing.