macenstein.com — Within hours of Apple releasing the Safari 3 beta for Windows, computer geeks from around the world began pointing out various security holes in the browser. Is there a chance Apple is hoping that by releasing a beta of Safari for Windows, it can let the hacking community do its QC work for it?
Jun 15, 2007 View in Crawl 4
reno582Jun 16, 2007
Well they certainly didn't want to impress us.
meatmcguffinJun 16, 2007
What's wrong with bonjour? It's a lot easier to connect to my friends windows machine using name.local instead of by IP address.
quarandoJun 16, 2007
The_Larch> Now the larger (and much geekier and hacker-centric) Windows population has a chance to test it out.Real geeks use Unix (they may hack windows, however).
lukeeJun 16, 2007
umm... because the other five are harder to patch, and they wanted to get the easy-fix ones squashed ASAP?
mcosmiJun 16, 2007
The answer to THIS question is no...but the release was definately iPhone related. Its been announced that ALL the third party applications will use and be developed using the Safari platform...so obviously they released Safari on Windows so that Windows users who buy the iPhone can actually DEVELOPE and take advantage of iPhone APPS!!!!It has nothing to do with a browser war, i would even venture to say that they don't give a s**t about Safari market share that much. They just want everyone to be able to A. develop, and B. access new apps for their iPhone.
djdoleJun 16, 2007
@cheatrz"Safari 3 Beta for OS X does not have the security holes that plagues the windows version. Therefor, the logic behind this is null."No. It wouldn't be cost effective for ANY company to totally reengineer their code just for a different platform. Especially not when that software is going to be released free of charge.You obviously don't understand a basic of software development. Use code that is already written, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.When you port an app over to another platform, a great MAJORITY of the same code is reused. The code may use different libraries (or just have wrappers to make the existing code work for the new libraries & API), but most of the code is not going to change.)So some holes that will be exposed in the windows version may not be exposed in the OSX or iPhone version due to either a more robust API, or (in the case of OXS) the higher security of the OS, or (in the case of the iPhone) the closed Software/Hardware API.What the Safari developers had to do was to patch their code to cover for the security holes and flaws in the base Win32 API & libraries. These security holes and flaws that may or may not be present in the OSX or iPhone libraries.All that said, there is still going to be code that is shared among all the different platform versions, and if any of that code has a bug, then releasing it to the HUGE magnifying glass that is the Windows IE & Firefox user-base on the PC, would benefit the Safari development teams by rooting out any flaws that may ALSO appear in the Safari device.Especially since Jobs has already stated to the press that he doesn't want the iPhone to be one of those devices that crashes often and you're rebooting multiple times a day.While rooting out bugs may not be the MAIN reason for the release (most likely it's to gain acceptance for Safari in the PC world prior to the release of the iPhone), but exposing bugs that need fixing across the board may also have been considered as a benefit.His logic != NULL;
davidburnsJun 16, 2007
I think market share has more to do with it than you think.There are TONS of web sites that don't render properly or work 100% with Safari, but will work perfectly fine with Windows Internet Explorer and Firefox. With Safari expanding onto PCs, bundled with iTunes, Safari becomes more relevant and no longer so niche... thus more web sites become more and more compatible with Safari, benefiting of course Macs and the iPhone.