Safari’s Rude Introduction to the PC
At the 2007 WWDC, Steve Jobs announced the immediate availability of Beta 3 of Apple’s web browser, Safari on Windows as well as Mac.
David Maynor from Errata Security posted the first vulnerability found in Safari before it was even mentioned in Jobs’ keynote.
BetaNews has a good article entitled ‘Day One’ for Safari for Windows Becomes Zero-Day Nightmare.
Apple’s Web site touts, “Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” As Larholm explained on his blog, that may very well be correct: Its engineers obviously designed Safari to take advantage of security protocols in the OS X operating system, as evidenced by function calls to those protocols Larholm located inside the source code for the Windows version – calls which would obviously go unfulfilled.
I think I’ll hold off on Safari for now…
2 thoughts on “Safari’s Rude Introduction to the PC”
I’ve found (Windows) Safari to be rather slow and causing a strain on my system.
A good article comparing FF, IE, and Safari:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070612-afirst-look-safari-3-on-windows.html
This comment brought to you via Safari btw.
As pointed out by many, elsewhere, one should keep in mind that this was a beta release, intended to find, diagnose and fix this very class of bugs.
Nonetheless, I myself fail to see the point of releasing Safari for Windows. The oft-repeated ability for Windows-based developers to test their sites in Safari doesn’t hold water to me—there is no way the Windows and Mac versions will render pages exactly alike. If the browser contained calls to OS X security hooks, I can almost guarantee that the graphical subsystem is also more than a little OS dependent.
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