Safari 3 Beta Updated, Security Problems Fixed

Llywelyn writes "Apple has released an update to the Windows Safari 3 Beta. According to Macworld the updates '...include correction for a command injection vulnerability, corrected with additional processing and validation of URLs that could otherwise lead to an unexpected termination of the browser; an out-of-bounds memory read issue; and a race condition that can allow cross-site scripting using a JavaSscript [sic] exploit.' It is available through either the Apple Safari download site or through Apple's Software Update."

Well!

It's about time! ;) What took them so long!

Re:Excellent! Just one more thing...

The whole review misses what I believe is the point of the release entirely. They approach it from the point of view of a user who would be using it as their default browser. But I don't think Apple is really trying to win significant market share on PC browsers.

What they do want, however, is for developers to test their pages in Safari, not just FF and IE. Until the release, many developers used the fact that they couldn't run Safari on their development platform as a reason for not testing in Safari. Since Safari's CSS rendering is very compliant, most pages that render well in FF also render well in Safari. But Safari's JavaScript engine has a lot of quirks that developers won't catch unless they actually test in Safari. With the proliferation of AJAX-enabled sites out there, it's becoming more common for Mac Safari users to hit pages that just don't work for them. This is what Apple is trying to prevent.

But now that Safari is available in Windows (and hopefully Linux will follow), developers can easily test that their pages will work for Mac Safari users, even if they don't choose Safari as their default browser. This release many have lots of warts, but it's plenty good enough to fire up a couple of times a day to make sure that a specific site works.

More about the iPhone than the web

It's not so much that Apple wants developers to test their websites in Safari as much as it is they want to give Windows developers a WebKit platform in which to test web apps, since apps will be running in Safari on the iPhone.

Re:Well!

I've found that a lot of web developers just don't realize which items are truly platform-independent, and which ones are not, until they test them and find out that some break. Formatting can be temperamental, as well. Just because a site is perfectly functional, doesn't mean it *looks* as good on other platforms without some adjustments.

Horrible International Language support

Downloaded and tried to open websites in Chinese. The rendering is just horrible, unreadable and totally unacceptable. Texts are not where they should be. In this sense, this Safari is even not as good as IE 4, which could display such webpages well. I heard that, (didn't try), Safari could not open most webpages in non-western languages.

Re:Horrible International Language support

The issue there is that Mac OS X's own international character support does all the hard work for the applications: they don't generally need to worry about it. On Windows, it's a very different story, which means it'll take Apple more than a couple of days to make WebKit/Win32 deal with it all as elegantly as it does on OS X.

Re:Horrible International Language support

NT handles Unicode character storage and manipulation just fine, yes.

Unicode font rendering (automatically selecting the a font which contains a particular character, because generally no font contains all Unicode characters, and if one did exist, it probably wouldn't be the text font in use) is a different matter altogether.

Mac OS X does sane font substitution when faces don't include a particular character. On Windows, AFAIK, typing a Japanese glyph when using a font that doesn't support that code point will result in the square block--on the Mac, the type renderer will find the closest visual match (in terms of style) for a font that does include the code point and use that for those glyphs.

Naturally

I'm your average rabid Apple fan, but surely they had to have a fix at least this fast to keep from looking stupid. I doubt they'll be as quick in the future.

I wonder if...

Konqueror's Win32 release will be as big a disaster.

Re:I wonder if...

There are far too many sites that just don't function in Safari for me to use it. Whether it is Safari's fault or the sites fault is not of importance, it works in Firefox, not in Safari.

Good sprint, but does Apple have stamina?

Developing a browser for Windows will be quite a test for Apple and the Safari developer community. Is Apple trying to get a larger user community (even tens of percents), or just making it possible for web developers easily test their servers for Safari? In any case, if Apple can survive in this market, they are in an interesting position - partner with Google, and offer their own services for Windows users perhaps?

Now if they would fix the text problem...

Now if they would just fix the problem that some people (including myself) are having where no text shows up anywhere in the application and you can't type in any of the text input fields (kind of hard to use a browser when you can't type in an address).

Re:Now if they would fix the text problem...

Yes, I've got this problem on my Vista install at work. Clicking the little spider icon to report the bug crashes the program.

Mini-review of Safari on my home Vista install: The non-standard Windows UI is annoying. If I wanted to resize only from the bottom right corner I would have bought a Mac. The lack of an advertisement blocker makes the software a poor alternative to Firefox. The bundling is annoying. I don't want Quicktime. Quicktime is ugly, ugly software. It makes Firefox crash, grabs all sorts of MIME types, throws its icon up on the desktop every time it updates no matter how many times you delete the icon, it installs a systray icon (for a media player?!? come on), and it won't play full screen videos. ITunes is only a good media player if you own a Ipod. Don't want that either. The Apple update service is annoying as well. Why a separate service? I want my apps to check for updates when I start them or not at all.

Good points? Well, Safari displays web pages, I guess. Good for Apple.

Re:Now if they would fix the text problem...

If you didn't want QuickTime bundled, why did you select to download the version that bundles it?

If it was True OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

the COMMUNITY would have had it fixed
and fixed WAY faster copyleft knockoff $Apple$

I, for one, refuse to acknowledge the EXISTANCE of closed source browsers.

Live Free or Die

Future recommendation?

Once Apple gets Safari for Windows to the point where it's very stable, I'll probably be recommending it to IE users. Yes, above FireFox and Opera. I use a Mac with FireFox, but most people don't need the extensions that FireFox offers, I love them, but your average user won't use them. What your typical end user wants: Simplicity, Speed, Security. IE offers simplicity, if Safari for Windows gets to the point where it's good (much better than it currently is) it will probably become my recommendation to your typical user....

Hosed fonts

does anyone else get the completely-unusable-font-version of Safari [flickr.com] after they install? I had this problem with 3 and now with 3.0.1.

Semi-OT: is there a hotkey for tab-switching?

This may be a stupid question, but every other tabbed browser I've used has a hotkey to switch between tabs. Generally, that's ctrl-tab. I can't find anything similar in Safari though, and that is a big deal breaker. Am I just missing something?

I thought it was just an SDK?

Apple seemed to have responded *awfully* quick to a security whole in their new SDK, almost as if it was a web browser vulnerability? But, it can't be a browser, that is not what people here said it was.

Security is not the big problem

Fixing the security issues may help in keeping Apple from looking foolish, but security is not the real problem with Safari for Windows. The real problem with Safari for Windows that Apple should be putting focus on is the user experience.* It's horrendous. Slow window redraws, completely broken Windows conventions, a total lack of extensibility, and on and on.

As a web developer, I'm pleased as punch that they've released a Windows version of Safari that renders pixel-for-pixel the same as the OS X version (it really does, I checked). However, Safari on Windows is not even in the running as far as being a candidate as a full-time browser on Windows. The user experience is simply too painful.

* I didn't say they should not focus on security. They most definitely should.

Blurry Text

It still has a bug that makes the text blurry. Please let me turn off anti-aliasing!

It's not a bug

Apple renders fonts to match the accuracy of the glyphs so that they resemble what they would look like in print, important for desktop publishing. Windows happily renders fonts inaccurately so that they're 1-pixel thin and packed into a pixel grid.

Awesome, now I can read /. again!

No wait... [imageshack.us]

But maybe it's just as good to not have any sensationalist headlines to mislead you? :-p

Why so negative on Safari???

I've used it on Windows XP Pro. A friend has been using it on Vista. Neither of us can find a single thing wrong with it in 2 days of browsing (even to my bank, the acid test of browsers). The LA Times reviewer recommends it. ComputerWorld praises it. But here on Slashdot about all I see are people giving it a thumbs down. Am I seeing a bit of bias here? Someone direct me to a web page that Safari 3 on Windows XP renders horribly. Please, I wanna see.

Still needs some work

One thing holding me back from testing it at all is that the most fabled "Font Smoothing" feature looks terrible on CRT's and makes all the letters look like BOLD fonts. I dunno about you guys, but it's much harder for me to read things if it's all in bold. :/

I could be asking for too much...

But for some reason, authentication to OWA sites doesn't work in Safari. I can get as far as entering my username and password... But then the browser just stalls. This recent update seems to fix my stability issues... but I still wish I had auto-scrolling..

WOW NO WAI!

A software developer released an update to a beta test?

THIS is real news. Thank you zonk, for not wasting people's time with pointless articles.

Blurry fonts....argghh!

That will learn me for using a CRT monitor. Setting font smoothing option to "light", makes little difference. I want a "sharp" option. :-(

Still can't configure proxy

yep, still doesn't work here :D

Speedy Gonzales

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.html [howtocreate.co.uk]

Interesting reading.

Pure garbage. Basic functionality missing: proxies

Call it flamebait if you like but even beta software, given that it's a public beta, that doesn't give basic web browser functionality (proxies) is pure and utter garbage. If I try to get to a web page, Safari picks up the proxy from IE and prompts for username and password, and then promptly crashes when I enter them. If you try to turn proxies off, you quickly discover that you can't do that as the button to modify proxies is greyed out. In it's current state I can use Safari at work to look at web pages on my hard drive, but not for web browsing. There is no excuse whatsoever for this. Many users are behind a proxy, and it's not an optional extra. The people who insist it's buggy because it's on windows (conveniently ignoring all the software that does work well....or at least better than this shit) are idiots. This is an excellent way to turn potential converts to your browser off for good. I've uninstalled at work and won't be touching it at home. Thanks for wasting my time Apple.

Another take on the Release

Another take on the release was put up here: http://www.standandcount.com/index.php/safari-tops -1-million-downloads-10 [standandcount.com]
The crux being PR loves download stats and two versions are better than one for that.

Doesn't fix it

Doesn't fix my rendering issues [imageshack.us]. And it occurs on two entirely different computers. Am I the only one to get this?

Gee

they haven't fixed [rec-sec.co.il] all the vulnerabilities yet.

Re:Gee

Which policy would you rather your OS vendor have:

1. Wait for the monthly "patch Tuesday"
2. Close vulnerabilities ASAP

Consider this - this is just a "preview" product - and not even on "their" platform. Its good publicity. They're handling the vulnerabilities the same way Tylenol handled the poisoned pill problem - actively, instead of with their head up Gates/Ballmer's rear end going "no problemo".

Patch Tuesday...

...is there for a reason [wikipedia.org].

Though I really would prefer vulnerabilities fixed asap, I can see the reason for Patch Tuesday, especially for non-0day exploits.

Safari 3.0.1, however, is just damage control.

Take your tinfoil hat off, man

First: complex software written for use on a wide variety of configurations WILL HAVE BUGS. I just don't see any way around it. This has nothing to do with competition. OS X in the past 2 months has had a huge number of patches, hasn't it? That too, with a BSD based kernel and a much smaller hardware base.

Second: Not every bug is a showstopper. Even if a bug is found after code freeze, it might be better to release a patch separately. You know, like those "errata" sheets of paper in books.

When a patch is released the vulnerability *has* to be disclosed! That means sysadmins would run around trying to keep systems up to date the whole month.

I agree that more out of cycle patches should be released for serious vulnerabilities that are being exploited, but I see nothing wrong with the Patch Tuesday method otherwise.

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

In the interest of having a viable stable platform for iPhone development, they're going to have to keep up this quick turnaround on defect resolution. As someone mentioned a couple of days ago when Win Safari was first released, they're also going to have to work really hard for this software to compete with other browsers (which many think it can't). While I agree that it's an impressive turnaround, for Apple's sake, I hope they can keep up the momentum.

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

I think Apple just wants a solid #3 Browser Spot. That way when people test their webpages they will check 3 browsers IE, Firefox, Safari. Before safari for windows Web Developers needed a Mac to test Safari. Thus making #3 Opera. With with the bulk of Mac People using Safari and a modest Windows people (because once it is finalize it will be shipped with Quicktime and iTunes.) So some people will try it and like it better then IE. So it could be a solid #3 and probably more tested for compatability on web pages... Now with websites better designed for Safari it would make the migration to Macs one more step simpler. (fear of compatibility of web pages) I doubt that Apple has plans to make a profit with Safari for windows but more of a case to make sure they don't get left out in the loop. Apple is realistic, they realize not everyone wants or will get a Mac. But they feel if more people given the choice they would actually prefer one. Offing Safari, iTunes, QuickTime for Windows makes sure that these are also well supported to in real life allowing apple to maintain control on the global standards. Otherwise companies of new technologies could forget about Apple. Say make a codex that there is no QuickTime port. or a webpage that doesn't work with Safari. It is all about keeping control on their interests.

I disagree

As someone mentioned a couple of days ago when Win Safari was first released, they're also going to have to work really hard for this software to compete with other browsers (which many think it can't).

I may be wearing my ass as a hat, but I honestly don't see Apple expecting Safari to compete in the Windows browser market. It is my (potentially asshattian) opinion that Safari is available on Windows solely for the purpose of providing a testing environment for iPhone development for Windows developers. It's never going to take over the Windows browser market (or even made a serious dent).

Having Safari available on Windows removes the 'Apple Only' hardware requirement for any company who wants to develop Web 2.0/AJAX applications that run on the iPhone which opens Safari development to a much much larger pool of developers.

Actually, you don't have to give out your email ID

Just don't fill in that field. :P

Re:not worth it

Er, you don't have to give an e-mail address to download it, just to sign up.

Leave the box blank and the check-box ticked and it still downloads.

Re:not worth it

I hate having to give out an email address just to get the download, and I hate even more having to uncheck several boxes to avoid downloading every piece of software Apple owns.

You don't need to give them your email address--you can just click the download button.

Re:not worth it

"it's likely to just disappear and not make it back onto my machine the next time I reinstall Windows."
How often do you have to reinstall Windows?
I am not a big Windows fan but I go years between reinstalls without any problems.
I only do a reinstall when I get new System or a new Drive.

Re:not worth it

If you hate it so much why did you enter your email address? It's not required.

That goes without saying

Gee, 1-day service. Sounds like Apple is a lot more serious about security fixes than Microsoft.
(but then again, we already knew that)

Yep, sounds like the choice of browser will be obivious. Slashdot should publish statistics of which browsers are used by Slashdotters to view Slashdot.

Re:Browser Statistics

That is one large group of browsers, as 192.03% of anything is pretty big.

Well, we are talking about Web 2.0 (which should equal 200% IIRC). I guess I forgot
* 7.97% - Other

Anyone have a download link to the latest version of Cowboy Neal?

I'd post it again, but I don't want to receive another DMCA takedown notice.

Re:I dont care what you say

I think the reason's pretty simple: companies like Google have been abusing the "beta" moniker lately. The betas I've seen from Apple (including Safari and earlier, Quicktime 7) have been more consistent with what I would consider a beta: they mostly work and are useful for testing, but still have significant problems.

Perhaps what they might have done is require an Apple Developer Connection account to download instead of making it available through general release.

Re:not worth it

You don't actually have to enter your email. You can just click download.

Also, "every piece of software Apple owns" == quicktime?

Re:Win2k support

I've heard that it appears to work as well as it does on XP. Just don't expect Apple to support it (not that anyone gives support for betas anyways)

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

Keep in mind that this is a beta version - they can fix things without having to check wether this will break anything.
Plus: One can assume that it takes less work to fix a new program which has a clean and fresh design. The code base doesn't get more logical/cleaner when you already applied a gazillion patches (e.g. IE 6)

I'll try to update now - for some reason Software Update tells me that there's nothing to install.

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

Given that it's a severe, obvious security hole and they don't seem to be doing much (if any) pre-release testing, I would've been very disappointed if Apple didn't get a fix out nearly immediately.

Re:Perpetual beta?

Ah yes, the old "it doesn't work for me, so it can't possibly have worked for anybody else" mentality.

Why does everybody who's found a bug of some kind [in anything, not just Safari] assume the particular set of circumstances which trigger it (which are usually largely unknown to the user insofar as it relates to the software in question) are so common that everybody must be suffering from it?

Re:not worth it

Did you try downloading without an e-mail address? It works just fine for me.

Re:I dont care what you say

Flamebait? maybe. But no more so than the slashdot articles themselves.

Re:I dont care what you say

I thought that was Steve's job?

clearly I needed a sarcasm tag for this post... nobody reads past the bit you quoted. I don't actually hate apple, or safari, what I hate is that all of this has been passed off as news and that everyone on this site is lapping it up.

Re:not worth it

it's likely to just disappear and not make it back onto my machine the next time I reinstall Windows.

Best advertisement for OS X I've seen all day. :P

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

That should get more people looking to Macs on their next hardware upgrade.

Because of one single quick patch...?

Apple had to do it to not look like complete fools, and that "beta" is still pretty much like an "alpha".

Re:Bugs reported one day, fixed the next.

This is also the first time I can remember seeing a company issue a security-only fix for a beta (not counting OSS programs that are in use on production servers even though they're still in 0.x versions).

I seriously figured they'd fix it in the nightlies, and wouldn't issue a fixed beta until they had, well, a new beta.

Re:Win2k support

works here. Windows 2000 sp4.
Running Safari 3.0.1, the bugfix released today.

Quicktime gives some funky error but works. Also, javascript client-side xmlrpc fails with no apparent error (vcxmlrpc) (works in IE6, Operan 9 and FF 2.0.0.4) Other sites all just great. Even gmail.

Error message below for yor viewing pleasure, from http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/d7625zs/even t/ [edgesuite.net] , steve jobs WWDC 2007 Keynote Address
-
QTSTimer: Safari.exe - Entry Point Not Found
-
The procedure entry point DdEntry1 could not be located in the dynamic link library GDI32.dll.
-
OK
-

PS: anybody know how to get a javascript error console or something like firebug for Safari on Windows?

Re:Ss

In Soviet Russia the sites script the overlords!

Re:Perpetual beta?

I admit, not a great choice in my subject wording.