I just became the owner of a brand new 13″ white MacBook and for the first time, I’ve been able to experience for myself many of the delights of Mac OS X.

Safari is Mac OS X’s default browser and it is a fine browser at that. According to Wikipedia, it has a market share now of around 4.7% in Q1 2007, and the general trend is increasing.

In this special Gizbuzz post, I thought I would take a look at Safari – where it is now and where it might go in the future.

A very brief history lesson

Safari is, as I said, OS X’s default browser, although that wasn’t always the case. Back when Apple looked like they were in real trouble, they struck a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft pledged to building Office 98 for the Mac, and Internet Explorer would become the default browser for Mac OS 9. It stayed that way right up until OS X Panther (10.3) in 2003.

At that point, Microsoft decided that they would discontinue IE for Mac and that prompted Apple to start development on their own browser, Safari, which would be released with the Panther OS release.

Safari wasn’t actually written from scratch. The KHTML rendering engine was being developed for KDE and Apple saw the opportunity to use the KHTML project to use as a base for Safari’s underlying code. With cooperation with the KDE developers, WebKit became the name for Safari’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript system. The core components of WebKit are still open source (as is KHTML), but the Safari GUI is proprietary.

Unfortunately, the code from Apple’s WebKit project and KHTML are not synchronised, such that a KHTML browser does not behave exactly the same as a WebKit browser (although there are efforts to try and ‘unfork’ the code and in the process make KDE’s Konqueror browser better).

Safari in the news

Recently, Safari has been in the news quite a bit and I want to focus on a couple of stories here.

Safari on the iPhone

First of all, back in January we had the iPhone announcement at Macworld. One of the things Steve Jobs said the iPhone ran (apart from OS X, of which there has been a lot of debate) was Safari.

Clearly it’s not the same as Safari on OS X as far as the frontend is concerned, but I’m pretty sure it is WebKit running at the backend. Certainly it’s one of the most advanced browsers on a mobile device the world has ever seen and it looks like we could see an interesting battle for the title of ‘Most Advanced Portable Web Browser’, with Opera doing similar good work on platforms like the Wii.

Safari on Windows

I think for the most part, this story was Digg hyperbole and I personally don’t think it’s likely to happen, but there were rumours that Apple were going to port Safari to Windows.

Apart from this fake screenshot, which to me looks like an elegant Photoshop of bits of the iTunes interface and some clever trickery, we haven’t seen any substantial evidence to support this claim.

Plus I don’t think Apple would do it – what is in it for them?

While Safari isn’t on Windows, there is a project to get the WebKit rendering engine on Windows, which should make it easier for web developers that don’t have a Mac to test on WebKit browsers. Swift is one such project. It’s currently pre-release, but it worked reasonably well on my Windows setup.

The future

On the WebKit project website, one of the things you can do is download a nightly build of Safari using the latest version of the WebKit engine. It hopefully gives you a taste of what Safari will be like in the future, and perhaps looking towards what will be on the final iPhone and in Mac OS X Leopard.

At the moment, the only differences I can find between stock Safari and the nightly WebKit are subtle – things like rendering button styles on HTML buttons instead of ignoring them for Mac styles (one of Safari’s favourite things to do).

Safari’s market share is still apparently increasing. Whether that’s due to more Mac switchers, or people already using OS X who are switching browsers, it’s quite significant. With the iPhone, we might see the number of Safari users increase still. Unless Safari/Win does arrive, or a large percentage of the world goes Mac tomorrow, it’s unlikely to make a huge amount of difference, however, apart from perhaps getting more developers to test for Safari and other WebKit browsers.

In the unlikely event that Apple do release an official Safari for Windows, Firefox may have a serious contender on its hands. Safari is much speedier than Firefox in a number of respects, including startup time and rendering speed, but the lack of extensibility and plugins might hamper Safari quite a lot if it were to take Firefox head-on.

Safari is a good browser, and if it was opened up to more people, then I think it would be a serious contender for browser market share. Apparently, though, Firefox extensions and a consistent interface across Windows, Linux and OS X have got me to tap out this article in Firefox for Mac OS X, instead of Apple’s offering.

Among the features are neat charts displaying how many items you read on a daily basis, monthly basis, or weekly basis. In addition, there is a chart showing how many items from specific blogs you have read (determining the most read blog in your feed readers) as well as a chart describing subscription trends.

This is a great way of unlocking all the great information that’s available in Google’s vast archive of data. Of course, it begs the question as to whether we’re secure with Google knowing this much about us. The issue has been debated mercilessly, and I’m one who tends to give my undying support to Google (they do host my email, calendar, RSS feeds, and provide my search), however as they slowly offer more ways for users to see their data I’m sure they’ll also need to ensure that this data is as secure as ever.

Interestingly, according to the blog post they got help from the people behind MeasureMap to make Trends. Google acquired the blog analytics service from Adaptive Path last year, and since then it MeasureMap has been closed (apparently to be improved and then re-opened, though my guess is that it will be rolled into the more used Google Analytics, a.k.a. Urchin). Adaptive Path are well known for their ability to design nice web user interfaces (and coincidentally are the folks who coined the term AJAX, really starting Web 2.0), and whilst the help of their former employees have ensured that Reader Trends works well and looks good, I would really like to have a look round MeasureMap.

It’s a nice feature – I didn’t know before, for example, that over the past month I have read 1,250 items from my 27 subscriptions, or that Scoble posted, on average, 6 items per day. By no means will this prove a killer feature for Reader, but it is something that other feed readers don’t have. To differentiate itself, a feed reader must have innovative features to add to the central functionality which it shares with all of the competition. This is such an innovative feature.

A screenshot of the new trends interface is after the jump.

Mozilla have just released Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 (codenamed Gran Paradiso).

The Alpha release is only for testing purposes, although it seemed fairly stable when I ran it for a while. Featuring in Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 are mostly under-the-bonnet changes at the moment:

• Firefox now uses the Cairo text and graphic rendering engine
• The Gecko HTML rendering engine is now updated to version 1.9
• Better support for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format
• Updates to the internal engine, including rendering changes and some small tweaks
• Now uses native Cocoa graphical elements on Mac OS X.

Some bad news for users of old operating systems, though, is that Firefox 3.0 will no longer support Windows 98, ME or Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2).

What astounds me is how quickly the Mozilla team can do this sort of work. Firefox 2.0 hasn’t even been out for two months, and Mozilla have already pushed out an Alpha release of 3.0. Being quite honest, I’d be very surprised if the IE team within Microsoft have already put out an alpha release of Internet Explorer 8. Arguably Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 wasn’t as big a leap as IE6 to 7, but still the pace set by Mozilla is quick.

This pace of innovation may prove to be quite crucial to Firefox’s success. As I’m sure you’re aware, Firefox has almost literally taken the browser market by storm; in its very short lifetime so far it has already conquered 10% of the world-wide browser market share and is set to continue eroding Internet Explorer’s dominance.

Will Firefox continue? Well, IE7’s bundling with Vista will no doubt be quite a hurdle to overcome for Firefox. IE7 finally supports some modern browser features like tabbed browsing, and people might not be so convinced to switch if the gap in functionality between IE and Firefox is less.

Only time will really tell us if this Mozilla golden age will continue.

[via Lifehacker]

Slashdot has the story that Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi revealed at the ToorCon hacker conference a vulnerability in Firefox that allows someone to take over a computer.

The vulnerability is so-called ‘zero day’ because no patch for the exploit is currently available and malicious hackers are using this in the wild.

Apparently, the exploit uses the way JavaScript is handled in Firefox and some malicious JavaScript code can cause a malicious hacker to gain control of the computer, regardless of whether it’s running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

You can mitigate this attack by either switching off JavaScript in Tools > Options (Win) / Edit > Preferences (Linux) / Firefox > Preferences (Mac), then choosing Content and unticking the relevant JavaScript option.

This is a bit limiting in that no website will be able to use legitimate JavaScript (for example, all Ajax applications will use it). Alternatively, you could use the NoScript extension for Firefox to only allow JavaScript on sites that you specify. This is what I do all the time, and although it is slightly irritating on some sites, it’s fairly quick and easy to add a site to your ‘whitelist’. Note that this would prevent the attack, but not if the malicious code got onto a site that you had trusted.

What is interesting about this is that it proves Firefox isn’t invulnerable to this type of exploit. However, we are very likely to see a patch and new Firefox version from Mozilla in the next few days. When you compare that to how long Microsoft usually takes to patch up Internet Explorer (with a few notable exceptions recently with the worst exploits), it usually takes at least the rest of the month for MS to get round to it in its patching schedule.

Firefox is, generally, secured pretty quickly (provided that users upgrade to the latest version).

In the meantime, I’d recommend you use NoScript and upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.8 as soon as it’s released.

UPDATE: Apparently this was a hoax and the vulnerability isn’t nearly as bad as it was first reported (it seems it can crash your browser, but nothing more).

The blog of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, IEBlog, have announced that Internet Explorer 7 will be distributed by Windows XP’s Automatic Updates feature as a ‘high priority’ update when it is released. This means it will have similar status to other high priority updates which are generally security patches and important bugfixes.

The knock-on effect of this will mean that a large proportion of Windows XP machines will be automatically upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 without any interaction on the user’s part (aside from confirming the install once IE7 has been downloaded).

Microsoft are offering a free download (requires ‘Genuine Validation’) which prevents the download and installation of IE7, but this is mainly aimed at companies wanting to prevent IE7 infiltrating their networks. It’s doubtful that most home users will be bothered to stop this.

Now there is a fairly good argument on Microsoft’s part about this move. IE7 does include numerous security enhancements, and the IEBlog team cited this as the main reason for auto-distributing IE7 across Windows Update.

There could be a more sinister motive here, however, and that could be to move users away from using or trying out alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

I’ll leave that judgement up to you.

Everyone knows that the browser wars are escalating. The success of Firefox, which has managed to gain significant market share from Internet Explorer, has forced Microsoft to innovate for their next release. At the same time, who can forget Opera, with unique features such as integrated BitTorrent and widgets?

Extreme Tech has a great roundup of the three most recent releases from the Big Three, Firefox 2.0 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 and Opera 9. It sits on the fence somewhat, pointing to advanced features on all sides. My personal opinion is that Firefox is still by far the best, since its extensions provide just about any other functionality that the other browsers might have.