Apple's Safari a Windows security risk?
By Thomas Ricker 
posted June 12th 2007 6:25AM
posted June 12th 2007 6:25AM
posted June 12th 2007 6:25AM
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As much as I loathe Apple...this is fricking beta software (very beta from all the crashes I am hearing about, poor ASP support, etc). It's going to have bugs. Let's worry about security risks when they actually claim it is a finished product, mmkay?
I think it was rushed in order to make the announcement at WWDC 2007. I think it's exactly right that it was made for iPhone. If you read the boards and if you've installed Safari on a variety of windows machines like I have, you realize this is one buggy beta. And that's just a fact. From inability to install on many machines in a workable fashion, to being crash prone, to rendering javascript poorly (compared to IE, Firefox and Opera), it is a RAW beta.
I think Apple really made a mistake. Windows users were willing to put up with the disaster that was early iTunes (still no great shakes) because of the already installed iPod base. With Safari, they're starting with a product that leaves a real BAD taste in the mouth of real PC users.
The rest of the fawning comments have to applets- there's just no way windows/pc users would embrace this browser at this point as it's a not-ready-for-primetime release.
I don't mind the look and feel of Safari for Windows, and it runs fine, except when it crashes, which is anytime I click on a link for video, or any third-party app is needed (i.e. Java). I use FF almost exclusively, so I was willing to try something new. I tried to get my wife to use it on her laptop, and she's an IE user (thinks it's faster than FF)-she didn't like it; but IE faithful won't use FF for the most part.
I'm using Vista Ultimate, so maybe it's compatibility with Vista that's a problem-it is a beta, but beta stuff from Microsoft is better than this (my opinion).
To those that need a keyboard shortcut for changing the web address in its entirety, simply hit ALT + D. This will work in IE, FF, and Safari. That's silly that you have to click a button to highlight the URL to change it to somewhere different.
Also, you should be able to use your mouse to move forward/backward without reconfiguring your drivers to accommodate a beta release, and without having to click the "back" button.
I have to wonder. Is Microsoft going to be blamed for this one? Like they always are? Sort of similiar to when iTunes wasn't working on Windows Vista, and Apple complained that Vista just wasn't good enough to work on, or something like that?
Will it be the same here too? Apple complains that Windows is too buggy and dangerous to use?
(I'm no fanboy of anyone. I'm just wondering if Apple will point fingers again)
Seems to work fine on my girlfriend's XP laptop with no crashes, I suspect tht most of the really bad crashes are restricted to Vista for the moment, something which is understandable if not really acceptable since Vista has a lower installed base than XP at the moment. The only really annoying thing I've come across is the fact it redirects to feed//engadget.com rather than http://. I don't know enough about web standards to tell if this is the site's fault or the browser's (it is the only site it's happened on) but as has been said firefox handles it fine so safari really should as well.
In order to highlight the whole address bar you just need to triple-click, double-clicking will just highlight a single word. Triple-clicking is hardly an effort and the fact it's done this way argubaly makes editing adressess (for when you do want to do so) much easier so this isn't exactly the total and utter failure of logic that some are depicting it as.
I'm loving the fact you can drag a tab off the bar and have it form it's own windows, great for opening a set of sites in tabs and then looking more closely at those you want to (although the lack of anything approaching the ease of expose in XP or Viista makes this not nearly so useful for the Windows faithful).
Do you work for Apple or something?
Triple clicking (or clicking the favicon) may be "hardly an effort" but it's much more effort than a single click. At least 90% of the time when I click on the address bar it is to type a new address, and on the rare occasion I might want to edit one or select a word this takes only 2 clicks (double clicking selects a word, 2 clicks an edit cursor). I don't understand how it's at all logical to have it this way. Maybe the average Mac user takes 15 attempts to successfully type a URL, so making edit the default action is more productive?
Being able to pull off tabs as new windows looks kinda neat, though not very useful. It's also pretty messy if you ask me- the whole point of tabbed browsing is to avoid having dozens of windows all over the place. Based on Apple's usual demo screenshots though, they seem to like a cluttered layout. Like this for example: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/spaces.html Who actually works with their windows all overlapping like that? It'd just annoy me. And I struggle to see how flip-3d in Vista lacks the "ease" of Expose - you either click the taskbar icon or press windows+tab, and then click the windows you want. (Or you could just click the windows taskbar icon). How is that difficult?
To me the point of tabbed browsing isn't so much to prevent clutter as to make it easier for you to work. Changing windows in the same application on XP is very fiddly and requires you to use the taskbar without any kind of visual representation of what's in the window.
Tabbed browsing isn't an ideal solution here, I prefer something like expose which gives a visual overview of the window because I simply work better by identifying things visually than having to read an arbitrary text description of it, you do spend most of your time looking at a web page rather than reading the tab description after all. This becomes even more important if you have a lot of tabs, it becomes a matter of guesswork when you've got various truncated names like eng...., bb....cyb.... in the tabs bar as to what they actually are, expose suffers none of these problems.
Flip 3D isn't as useful as expose because it doesn't allow you to see all your windows, very easily, at once. The whole point of expose is that you get an *ahem* exposed overview of your work. Flip 3D requires you to scroll through windows looking for one and then to select it - time consuming and more complex.
Of course its buggy. Its a Widows app. You can only polish a turd so much.
I'm glad that some people are still unashamed of being idiot zealots. It makes it much easier to skip over the time wasting posts such as yours. Apple screwed up and released a buggy product. I can write code that will have errors if you try to run it on Mac OS - I guess that Apple freaking blows at writing operating systems.
I think eBay put it best:
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/1805/safarios5.png
Security issues asside...Safari looks horrible on my Vista machine. For some reason it displays the fonts differently than all my other programs and it almost looks like Clear Type is not functioning properly in Safari. Text looks blurred and fat. I checked the fonts and they seem to be standard fonts the same as Firefox uses...so I don't know whats going on. But it's unusable as it causes eyestrain after a few minutes.
Also it crashes every few minutes for no apparent reason at all. Also sites are coming up as RSS feeds for no reason. Have to refresh a few times for them to load normal.
It's not worth it until they fix all of these bugs.
Cleartype is being overridden. You are looking at the font rendering method used in OS X. There are epic battles all over the web over which is "right" or "better" and this release has rekindled some flaming if you care to check out some other blogs.
What a horrible move on Apples part. If those guys could get their heads out of their stuck up asses for 5 minutes...they would realize that it is foolish to force a different font rendering than all other windows on folks. Especially when that font rendering looks decidedly worse. It's blurrier and looks awful.
Windows AERO UI looks much cooler than the forced page UI also. Just let the damn thing act like any other windows program I say.
I have to agree here. For a company that places so much value on "human interface guidelines" and promotes standards for how 3rd party apps should look/behave for consistency, Apple just throws it to the wind when it comes to making apps for someone else's platform. I guess they're adhering to their own standards, but it sure doesn't help the people actually trying to use the software.
Have you noticed that you can't buy an Apple laptop without also buying a Toyota Scion to place your Apple stickers on the rear windshield? Apple users are the typical rebels without a cause. You've rebelled to express your individuality only to become just like everyone else, just in a different group.
Exactly.
Getting bugs reports is the main reason for releasing beta code to the public. So...success! :)
And as basis for comparison: The first GA release of IE7 failed to even install and execute properly on my XP laptop. The first couple GA releases of Firefox 2.0 were so buggy I downgraded back to 1.5.
My point isn't to bash other browsers, or to say Apple is so great. But I happen to think bringing Safari to the PC will ultimately be a good thing for users of every browser, and if you're going to run beta code then please consider submitting bug reports.
I'm not exactly an apple fan but i got pretty excited when this came out, I wanted to see how well it preformed. First impressions of loading an uncached page heavy on graphics was "wow that was faster then firefox" then i started to look deeper and i find their bookmarking very inconvenient to use, also this things a memory hog. I figured whats the better way to test a browser then to find a really bad myspace page with tons of flash and screwed up css right? Safari completely froze on me after sucking up 200 mb of ram. I'm hoping these get ironed out because i would love to see another browser work its way into windoze competition is good so hopefully it can keep things moving.
crashed on 3 different windows compiuters for me
Does Safari for windows have flash? I cannot listen to any bands songs on myspace. Sup wit that?
Looked forward to trying it on Windows XP as majority of apple products have been a good experience, but this is barely a beta release, it should have been labelled as an alpha release and tested internally first!
--
GREAT IDEA... Oh wait, it's a Developers's Conference and they are going to be using Safari to test their online apps. Oh snap! What do 90% of developers make their stuff for? WINDOWS!
Oh man.. Apple is smart! Are you are a retard.
"No google toolbar? "
Hahha.. another idea FF ripped off Safari. Are you blind?
Do you know the difference between a search box and a toolbar?
This is the Google toolbar:
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html
If you'd read beyond the first three words in his post you'd have seen he mentioned the Google toolbar is useful for checking pages page rank for search engine optimisation purposes. A Google search box doesn't do that.
I checked it out. Having 2 Google seach boxes is clumsy ugly and redundant, and nothing else on that toolbar interests me.
As for checking Google mail.. a much better solution is to have all your mail services caught in one program (like Outlook or Apple Mail) ... when you have new mail, that program will indicate new mail (eg. Red Dot on Mail icon). Having a Gmail button is fugly and clumsy.
Yall are missing the big picture... Think itunes-quicktime-safari bundle... That's how the market share will increase ;)
FF stole google toolbar from Safari? I thought it was for IE first....no PR indicator for me = useless.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
Keep trying fanboi.
Just crashed for absolutely no reason. I'm finished with it. It is not worth using.
Ya. This is a Beta and thats a fine excuse. If you don't like it don't download it. Wait for the GM.
The point of the beta release is to find, identify and remedy these problems. I used it for a day and I it didn't work on certain site or with certain plugins like Pith Helmet or Saft so I uninstalled it with no problem and it reverted me back to version 2.
If you're on a PC, find the bugs, report them to Apple. Make this an awesome browser which it has the potential to be.
Whether you like Apple and/or Safari or not, PC and/or FireFox users to should be happy that there is new competition in the web browser application category. Remember competition is good for the consumer because it drive the industry to innovate.
Just like how the iPhone is pushing other companies to make a competitive products Safari for Windows will push FireFox and IE to improve as well. Well maybe FireFox, but I think IE is over.
Kinda funny how IE use to be the best web browser for Mac and now Safari will be the best web browser for Windows (once released of course).
Why would anyone NOT use FF ? i have all 3 Dl'd , but i can not understand why anyone would use anything other then FF .. What advantages does IE or safari have ?
I remember using Vista Betas, Firefox Alphas + Betas, and IE7 Betas that worked a lot better than this.
Of course the Apple fanboys can decided that a piece of software is bad when it's in beta, but when you say something about an Apple beta, go help you.
can decide*
god help you*
Wow. I'm on a freaking typo rampage.
hmmm. I guess that's why they call it a beta. we all know the risks associated with using a product in beta.
Windows users are not the enemy! They are potential customers for apple, so it would be very stupid for Apple to deliberately send a bug-filled browser to windows users.
I have Safari on my Windows Vista PC. It starts up fine, but then i go on google and as soon as i type something in the search bar, Safari crashes. Also, loads of links dont show up. that might be due to lack of plug ins but as for the crashing, i dont know if thats Safari (maybe because its a beta?) itself or because of Vista. in any case, im sticking with Firefox.
DO NOT USE iTUNES OR SAFARI ON YOUR WINDOWS VISTA OR WINDOWS XP
COMPUTER
===============================================================
DO NOT download or use APPLE's ITUNES, SAFARI OR QUICKTIME FOR WINDOWS VISTA OR WINDOWS XP!
The saying "There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch" couldn't be more true in the case of iTunes/Quicktime from Apple Inc.
iTunes & Quicktime for Windows contain Spyware -- software used to track usage of your computer and alter its operation. In addition, running these programs on Windows Vista can often crash your computer.
Personal information is transfered by Quicktime/iTunes, without your knowledge, to Apple computer Inc., and its marketing partners, over the Internet.
IF YOU ALREADY HAVE iTUNES OR QUICKTIME INSTALLED ON YOUR NEW DESKTOP COMPUTER OR LAPTOP YOU CAN REMOVE IT BY GOING TO THE "PROGRAMS AND FEATURES" CONTROL PANEL (in VISTA), OR IF YOU ARE USING XP, BY GOING TO THE "ADD/REMOVE SOFTWARE" CONTROL PANEL.
How Apple's spyware scheme works:
Since at least the year 2000, the Quicktime (and now iTunes) installer from Apple copied several programs, without the user's permission or knowledge, which permanently altered the user's Windows system.
Removing some of the components did not help. Each time the user visits ANY Apple or related website that uses"Quicktime", something installed by iTunes causes at least two invisible background processes (qttask.exe and ituneshelper.exe) to get installed in the user's computer's Startup Programs list which get automatically launced. The claim for "ituneshelper.exe" is that it "required" for burning CD's, but it does not make sense why you need an INVISIBLE BACKGROUND PROGRAM running on your system 24 hours a day just so you can burn CD's once in a while. No other CD burning software has such a requirement.
The other program "qttask.exe" is also spyware with apparently no other purpose.
WHEN THESE PROGRAMS AUTOMATICALLY CONNECT TO APPLE'S SERVERS, BEHIND YOUR BACK, APPLE USES YOUR IP ADDRESS AND OTHER INFORMATION TRANSFERRED TO APPLE FROM YOUR COMPUTER, TO PERSONALLY IDENTIFY AND TRACK YOU ON THE INTERNET FOR MARKETING (AND OTHER) PURPOSES.
APPLE INC. HAS A HISTORY OF SUCH ACTIVITIES AS WELL AS CASES WHERE EMPLOYEES USED THE INFORMATION (GATHERED FROM MILLIONS OF COMPUTER USERS) TO STALK MINORITIES THEY HATE OR OTHER PEOPLE THEY KNOW.
I have since switched to alternatives (see below), but I was still stuck with Apple's spyware for weeks before I was able to remove it.
ALTERNATIVES TO APPLE'S QUICKTIME/ITUNES SPYWARE
=================================
IF YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO PLAY QUICKTIME (AND OTHER TYPES) OF MOVIES, YOU CAN DOWNLOAD "VIDEOLAN" FROM http://www.videolan.org/
VIDEOLAN PLAYS QUICKTIME AND MOST OTHER FORMATS IN EXISTANCE INCLUDING DVD, MPEG ETC.
As far as music downloading service goes, there are many many alternatives including MusicMatch.com, Rahpsody.com, etc...