News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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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.
Senior vice president in charge of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller was quoted in the release as saying Safari 3.1 "supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience". Web developers will certainly appreciate some of Safari’s new features. Safari 3.1 adds support for the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and now supports CSS Animations. Apple says Safari is the first browser to support these features. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts. Touting its speed against competing browsers, Apple says Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers, the company said.
Safari 3.1 is available for free download from Apple’s web site or via Software Update.
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
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
Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009. According to a draft schedule discussed at a Tuesday meeting, Mozilla wants to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview, or alpha, ready by July, then move to a beta by August. The schedule slates final code delivery in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2009.
Gregg Keizer | Jun 27, 2008
App Store developers will now be able to reach customers in 13 new countries, according to an announcement on the iPhone Developer Program news page.
