Funtime Xtreme

At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, Steve Jobs announced Safari, the open-source web browser installed on all Mac OS X machines, is now available for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Even though it is just a beta version of Safari 3, this does mean those Safari lovers out there can now use this robust open-source browser on their Windows machines. Statistics have shown that Safari useage has steadily increased since it became the default browser for Mac OS X machines, averaging an increase of 40% per year. Even more statistics have shown that, when compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer, Safari receives far less attacks from malicious code (I have seen the article and just can’t find it right now).

I don’t personally use the Safari browser, not even when on my Mac, but I do know some people that absolutely love the browser, and use it regularly. It does load web pages faster than Firefox, and Steve Jobs has called it the “Fastest browser on Windows.” Reading reviews of Safari for Windows, I can see why people love it so much. My only problem is the extension support provided by Firefox. Without some of those extensions, I feel lost during my browsing session. Hopefully, Firefox can take a hint from Safari and realize that people want faster web browsing, along with high functionality. I will be checking out Safari a little more now, and will be downloading it on my Windows XP machine…

Download Safari

UPDATE: David Maynor, infamous for the Apple Wi-Fi hack, has discovered bugs in the Windows version of Safari.

UPDATE 2: Thor Larholm has discovered a 0 day exploit in Safari within 2 hours of installing.

UPDATE 3: Israeli Security Researcher Aviv Raff has discovered a memory corruption, that may be exploitable.

Looks like people might want to wait until some of these fixes are discovered and handled before downloading Safari and using it as their primary browser. I have read in some places where researchers feel this was only put out so Windows only developers can create applications to run within Safari on the iPhone.

UPDATE4: Apple has released Safari 3.0.1 Beta for Windows, patching many security vulnerabilities mentioned last week. The new version can be downloaded from Apple’s web site, or through the “Apple Software Update” application.