Dive into OS X

The Safari 3.0.2 Beta is now available for download. This beta includes fixes for international users and for missing text issues caused by having a large number of fonts installed.

Apple announced yesterday that Safari for Windows has been downloaded more than 1 million times within its first 48 hours of existence. But will this be enough to compete against Internet Explorer and Firefox? Safari currently holds 4.9 % market share, where Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox holds 59.8 % and 33.7 % market share respectively.

In addition, the company also released Safari for Windows 3.01 after security concerns arose earlier this week.

The new version is available through Apple’s software update or downloaded from Apple’s site.

Apple released the 3.0 beta on Monday, and hackers started digging up bugs within hours.

The Safari 3.0.1 update, released early Thursday morning, fixes three bugs in the Windows beta browser, including bugs that were discovered earlier this week by researchers Thor Larholm and Aviv Raff. According to Apple, two of the three bugs don’t affect the Safari 3.0 beta that runs on Mac OS x, but the third can also crash the Mac browser.

Apple describes the bugs being patched as follow:

The updated version patches CVE-2007-3186, a command-injection vulnerability that may lead to arbitrary code execution; CVE-2007-3185, an out-of-bounds memory read issue that may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution; and CVE-2007-2391, a race condition that may allow cross-site scripting.

The updates come just four days after the company released a beta version of Safari for Windows at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. This quick update is remarkable because Apple managed to fix some serious security vulnerabilities in a very short time frame. Their usual response time is mostly counted in weeks or months. This indicates that Apple is serious about being an important browser contender for Windows users.

This is the first time that Apple has released a version of Safari for the Windows platform. Because it now can be run on a much larger number of systems, the code has been getting more attention from the security community.

Security analysts expect to see several more updates from Apple in the coming weeks.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Apple released a beta of their Safari web browser for Microsoft Windows.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, said at the Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday something that is not surprisingly for Apple tools: “What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world”.

But is this true? I have some doubts!

Security vulnerabilities have been revealed within just a few hours of release.

Aviv Raff claims to have found the first security vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser on Windows only hours after the software was released. Raff tested the application against his browser security testing tool: Hamachi.
Raff wrote on his blog: “A first glance at the debugger showed me that this memory corruption might be exploitable. Although I’ll have to dig more to be sure of that”.

Thor Larholm who described himself as “a pretty ordinary guy from a small town in Denmark”, also downloaded and installed Safari for Windows on his PC. After a few hours of testing he found a serious bug: “I now have a fully functional command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site.”

And also David Maynor reported security vulnerabilities on his site: “we found a total of 6 bugs in an afternoon, 4 DoS and 2 remote code execution bugs.”

Yes, it is still a pre-release code, but we expected something better, especcialy from Apple! It is possibly the most crap browser on the planet! So, now, remains the question: Why produced Apple a Windows version of Safari and not do it properly? How is this helpful for the company?

The clue’s on that unavoidable start page and it’s called iTunes. No doubt, Apple’s future is based on selling content, not computers, and this is a next (clumsy) step to this new goal.

Apple said today that it would make its Safari Web browser available for Windows-based PCs.
“What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Jobs also claimed that “Safari performs twice as fast as its competitors”.

Safari, which was released a few years ago for Apple’s Macintosh computers, has captured about 5 percent of the world’s browser market share with more than 18 million users, Jobs said. Internet Explorer, which is built into Windows, has a 78 percent share, while Firefox has climbed to 15 percent of the market, he said. Jobs continued by saying that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application.

But the most important point is the fact that Apple’s upcoming iPhone will run Safari. That means, Jobs said, that any application designed to run on the Safari browser for Macs also would be fully compatible with the iPhone — Apple’s highly anticipated combination cell phone, iPod and wireless Web browser. The iPhone will be available in the U.S. on June 29.

The move to make Safari available to non-Mac users is not unprecedented: Apple also makes its iPod media players and iTunes Store for Windows. The strategy is aimed in part at drawing more people to its Macintosh computers. “It will create a much more significant consumer platform for the iPhone,” said Mike McGuire, a research analyst at Gartner, an industry research firm based in San Jose, Calif. This move indicates that Apple is increasingly confident in its ability to compete against Microsoft’s desktop computing monopoly.

The Safari news was unexpected; A test version of the program will be available beginning today for downloading from Apple’s Web site.

Much of the rest of the presentation focused on showing of 10 new features of the company’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system.