That's right. Safari is an application and so lives under /Applications, which is one a few special directories where the user can make changes, which actually

That's right. Safari is an application and so lives under /Applications, which is one a few special directories where the user can make changes, which actually live under /System/Volumes/Data in a scheme similar to unionfs under Linux. Which is to say, / under Catalina and above (so, since 2019), the root partition is really the mount of an APFS snapshot. There's security as a reason, but also from a system perspective, it makes it more robust to upgrade/downgrade OS versions under such a scheme because you always have a known-good system image to revert back to. Safari though is a special case, and so /Applications/Safari.app is a symlink to ../System/Cryptexes/App/System/Applications/Safari.app https://superuser.com/questions/1495124/read-only-file-system-when-i-try-to-touch-in-mac-os-catalina https://superuser.com/questions/1495124/read-only-file-syste...