Apple Safari exposes Windows to drive-by download attacks

"Apple today shipped Safari 4.0.4 to fix a total of seven security flaws that expose Windows and Mac users to a wide range of malicious hacker attacks.

The high-priority update patches vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution (drive-by downloads) if a user simply surfs to a maliciously rigged Web site. Some of the issues affect Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system."

Source: zdnet

The 4.04 Safari update for Mac was released last 11 november.

I downloaded the latest Safari and am not impressed. It takes forever to open Gmail and it has problems with Thai Visa giving some kind of message about scripting problems.

Google Chrome crashes and Firefox is still the best browser on my Windows 7 Pro machine. Internet Explorer is second to Firefox but is much slower.

I would not use Safari in Windows. Firefox is still the best as you say.

But on my Macs Safari is better than Firefox.

The 4.04 Safari update for Mac was released last 11 november.

Thanks, I missed the date on the article - November 11, 2009.

I guess those drive by attacks were for Windows. Haven't heard about any (actual exploits that is) for OS X. There's nothing that can be done about these until browsers get proper sandboxing. If you talk to any security researcher they'll say that there are zillions of not-yet-found zero day exploits waiting.

In Safari/OS X, the biggest area of attack is QuickTime - it's a bit similar to ActiveX in that it will never be possible to stop all leaks in this old software.

On Windows, Chrome has impressed me of late - I hope it comes to the Mac soon. Safari is good but what I really like about Chrome is the new UI paradigm. Big search entry field, and does the right thing, and it's very fast. It's strange but it seems like Google is currently overtaking Apple when it comes to user interfaces on the desktop. For example, Gmail - it's a much better way to manage mail than say Apple's Mail.app (or any other mail client I know of). It just makes more sense. Chrome seems similar - for the way I use browsers, the Chrome UI makes more sense.

Firefox IMO seems to be going down the drains. The great thing about firefox used to be its simple user interface. But it has not kept with the times, and both Safari and now Chrome are much more elegant in letting you do the things you want to do with minimum fuss and muss. Particularly annoying about FF is the plug in management - it seems like every time I start the browser, I have to download some odd updates to some odd plug-ins. That's just stupid. A bad solution.

Safari is very good, only second to Firefox.

Particularly annoying about FF is the plug in management - it seems like every time I start the browser, I have to download some odd updates to some odd plug-ins. That's just stupid. A bad solution.

I don't think it's a bad solution at all. Besides, you can always disable automatic update notifications if you don't like it...

In Firefox:

Tools >> Options >> Advanced >> Update