Recently in Safari Category

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.

Let's get to it: I have one Web site that I work on infrequently that requires Internet Explorer, but since I barely have to do anything on it, I am free to use IE, or not.

And I waited at least a year to "upgrade" my IE6 to IE7 on the XP box at work. Yeah, it's an upgrade because now IE has tabbed browsing -- a feature Firefox has had for years, and which IE probably would've never added had FF not had it first.

I like IE6 because it was a fast program -- it opened fast and did the rest of its thing fast. And I could use it as an FTP client.

Now that I have IE7, sure there is tabbed browsing, and it looks a little better, but it's way slower than Firefox, and I pretty much only fire up IE for ONE Web site because it's at the top of my IE favorites and the bottom of my FF favorites.

IE loads more slowly, the favorites come up slower -- basically it gets beat by FF in performance by every measure. (I'm running a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM.)

And I can run Firefox in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ... and I do (though I'm partial to the Mozilla-derived Epiphany in the GNOME desktop, as well as the Seamonkey browser/e-mail client/HTML editor suite -- also based on Mozilla).

Truth be told, if it really bothered me, I'd try to roll the box back to IE6, if that indeed can be done. Since IE7 installs over your IE6, I think it might be a problem to "go back."

Note: While I can't get the same FTP functionality out of IE7, I have a Windows workaround: Open up My Computer from the Start menu, and type your FTP address in the search bar. The window functions pretty much like IE6 -- it's the same "Explorer"-like interface Windows uses to let you examine your own files, and it does FTP just like IE6. Thanks, Microsoft!

I used to think IE was the best browser for OS X, too -- that final version of IE5 for the Mac was a masterful, innovative application, and I'm sorry Microsoft abandoned it. Safari doesn't have enough critical mass to cut it -- many Web sites don't look so hot in it -- so Firefox is pretty much the browser of record for the Mac, too.

And Mozilla is making hand-over-fist money by getting a cut of the Google searches made through the browser. All it means is more money that Microsoft isn't making.

Hope you're happy, Microsoft!

The theory that Apple's Safari release is a step along the way to Apple offering pre-bundled Windows on its Macintosh line is offered today on Ed Bott's Microsoft Report:

So, my prediction: Come October, when Leopard ships, Apple will announce that anyone buying a new Mac can order an Apple-customized version of Windows Vista preinstalled on the same system. If I’m an Apple stockholder, do I care that those machines aren’t running OS X full time? Absolutely not. Windows can hang on to most of its market share, while Apple cuts a huge slice out of the hardware market currently owned by less nimble, less cutthroat competitors.

I’d consider buying an Apple-branded box if it came with Windows preinstalled. Would you?

Hmmmm. The only reasons I don't think that this is totally whacked out are:

A) Plenty of people are already buying and loading Windows on their Intel Macs,

B) It's no skin off of Microsoft's nose whether somebody buys Windows for the Mac or PC platform, as long as they buy Windows,

C) The Mac is a big player in the high-end laptop and desktop market, and Microsoft would love to broaden its market in that segment.

D) As Mr. Bott says, Apple stands to make money by selling Windows -- money it's leaving on the table now by making machines that run Windows and telling customers to buy the OS elsewhere.

E) I keep forgetting that Steve Jobs sees Apple as a hardware maker, even though Apple's software has been a powerful motivator for hardware purchases over the years.

Scot Hacker at O'Reilly Network thinks the real reason for Safari's port to Windows is because of the search bar. Since the searches generally go through Google, Apple gets a cut of the ad revenue generated by those queries.

O'Reilly's Hacker cites John Gruber for the following:

“It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. … The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) … For example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. … Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.“

Money -- it's what's for dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with it. (Insert your own cliche here).

Can you tell I've been trolling the ZDNet blogs today? Here's another analysis of Apple's Safari-for-Windows announcement, this one from Alan Graham of ZDNet's Web 2.0 Explorer blog.

Among the things coming out of Safari for Windows, Graham cites a growing market share for Safari, a revitalization of QuickTime as a video medium of the Web (sorry, Steve Jobs, that ship has sailed, and the name on its backside is "Flash") and the (to me puzzling) connection between Safari and the nascent iPhone platform.

Here's his take on the iPhone connection (go to the whole item for the rest):

We know that Apple is releasing a Safari/webdev kit so developers can develop web apps for (the iPhone). Why limit this to Mac developers? The phone is obviously designed to appeal to Mac and Windows users, so to ensure development for the phone on the Windows side, they need a platform to build on. Safari will no doubt be the major component that ties the phone and iTunes together, and we’ll likely see an explosion of web app development this fall after the phone is released. Windows support is crucial to their long-term phone strategy and that is especially important when it comes to browsing. Just look at all the sites that are popping up to work with the Wii…I have no doubt in my mind we’ll see lean and mean Safari sites for the iPhone.

Apple does have some great programmers, and maybe they can turn Safari into something that has value for both Windows and Mac users. I still think that Mac OS X is one of the best GUIs out there (based on BSD for those who care to know, so it's directly comparable, in my mind, with all the Linux/BSD GUIs out there, including KDE and GNOME). If Cupertino can innovate in the browser space, it can and will bring more people to OS X and the Mac platform.

And the development of Safari will answer, again, whether or not the iPod was a lucky hit for Apple, or the result of great minds making great products. We'll see, won't we?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog downloads and tests Apple's new Safari browser for Windows. Besides wondering why, he doesn't much like the look of it but does like its bookmarking and RSS capabilities.

He sums up thusly:

I don’t see Safari catching on in any big way on the Windows platform. Safari for Windows - yes, it does crash!!!It’s too ugly (really ugly, especially on Vista, in fact, I’m looking at it now and it’s so darn ugly that it’s actually making me angry) and there’s no one unique feature that stands out as being worthy of making a switch. I also wasn’t all that impressed by the fact that the browser crashed on me a couple of times in about an hour. The crashes, combined with the speed with which a exploit was uncovered make me wonder whether Apple can write code for Windows.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. As I wrote yesterday, I'm really a creature of habit. Once I start using something, I pretty much stick with it until I find a reason not to. At that point, something new not only solves my particular problem with the old product but also gives me a host of new features I didn't even know were there, but which I now need and want.

That's how I switched from Safari to Firefox on Mac OS X. And while much has been made of Apple's melding of the iPhone and Safari (developers for iPhone can get it done solely with Ajax and Safari, or so I read), I'm not in the iPhone demo because a) I'm not wealthy by a longshot, and b) I ALSO keep my cell phones until they're obsolete, so my Motorola V180 is still rocking it big time with the new battery I just bought for it from eBay.