News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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I’m sure you’ve all been waiting, hearts in your throats, to find out when Google will bring its fancy new Chrome browser to the Mac. Well that wait—the wait for finding out when the program is coming, not the wait for the browser itself—is over. So, er, I guess you could say the wait for the wait is over?
Last Friday, Google’s Brian Rakowski, who’s the product manager for Chrome, said that the browser, which internally just hit a new major milestone, is due out for Mac and Linux in the first half of this year. Sometime. Currently, the versions for those platforms are running at the very basic “test shell” level, meaning that they’ve still got a ways to go before they can do anything more than viewing web pages.
The latest development iterations of Chrome have added more features to the young browser, including autocomplete of URLs, full page zoom, browser profiles, better safe browsing, and the groundwork for eventually supporting browser extensions, a la Firefox. Newer versions of underlying technologies like WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine got integrated as well. The company plans to release updates to the "stable" version of the browser approximately every quarter.
I’m intrigued to try a Mac-native version of Chrome, though I don’t know if it’ll knock out Safari, my current browser of choice. What about you, friendly neighbourhood Forum readers? Any interest?
wrote on January 13, 2009 12:22 PM
I use Firefox 3 too but I must say there are still sites out there that don't load up correctly because the sites are made to work with IE only and all other browsers just don't like them. I have tried Safari but I found it has issues loading some sites up. One wish would be for webmaster to build sites that run on the top browsers instead of thinking everyone uses IE.
If you're using Apple's Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud. Safari doesn't make PayPal's list of recommended browsers because it doesn't have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer. "Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," Barrett said in an interview. "Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera." Safari is the default browser on Apple's Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera run on the Mac. Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another problem is Safari's lack of support for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.
Robert McMillan | Feb 29, 2008
Almost exactly at the stroke of midnight Tuesday (Sydney time), Apple released a new version of its Safari web browser for Mac and Windows operating systems. This keeps with the "tradition" this year of releasing or at least announcing products on Tuesday each week (Cupertino time). This one had the added convenience of not requiring too late a night for Antipodean Apple watchers.
Jim Dalrymple and Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 19, 2008
PayPal, eBay’s electronic payment service, plans to take the dramatic step of locking out people using older versions of web browsers in order to stem phishing attacks. PayPal said a “significant” group of people still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, and IE 4, which debuted in 1997. Those browsers lack a phishing filter, which can block users from accessing a reported phishing web site.
| Apr 21, 2008
Amit Singh thought something was missing from OS X. The Google engineer — and author of Mac OS X Internals — took a look at what the Mac operating system didn’t have that Linux and Solaris did. “One thing stood out,” Singh said. “There was no easy way to do file systems.” So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google’s search team at the time and wasn’t part of the company’s Mac development efforts. The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.
Phillip Michaels | May 16, 2008
This morning Apple released a new version of its iPhone SDK for developers. iPhone SDK beta 2 includes Interface Builder, a component of Apple’s development tools that lets developers create the interface for their applications. That seems to be the only major change in the latest build, according to the SDK’s read me, which continues to list some known issues. Apple says “this second beta is known to be incompatible with installation folders other than the default /Developer.” Given the importance of UI on the Mac, Interface Builder is a pretty critical tool in the development process, and some developers had chosen to hold off on their efforts until the SDK was revised. Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK at a special event earlier this month, allowing developers to begin building applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Several high-profile companies have already jumped onboard, demoing their applications at the event. Highlighting the demos was AOL with a native AIM client; other applications from Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, and Apple were also shown.
