Dive into OS X

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.