Safari facilitates secure, private browsing: Apple

SINGAPORE: Web browsers are most essential requirements for users to access the Internet. With an upsurge in virus, malware, spyware attacks, etc., choosing a good browser in terms of security and compatibility is prime among nearly all Web users. Apple recently entered the browser domain unveiled Safari, its own Web browser for Windows. Apple claims that Safari is the most 'secure' among the existing browsers.

In an interaction with Abhigna N.G. of CIOL, Darren Sng, senior software product marketing manager, Asia Pacific, Apple, spoke at length about the latest security features provided by Apple within Safari. Excerpts from an interview:

CIOL: What is Apple Safari? How it is different from the other Web browsers?





Darren Sng: Safari is the fastest browser on Macs, and now it's the fastest browser on Windows. On 11 June 2007, Apple announced Safari 3 for Windows PCs and Macs based on the industry standard iBench tests. Safari has a number of other new features that make it the best Web browser on the Mac. For example, Safari puts everything you need to browse, search, view RSS feeds and manage your bookmarks in a clean, easy-to-use navigation bar.

Safari also allows private browsing. This basically allows you users to hide their surfing tracks during any given session. Say, you're surfing from a cyber café and you're concerned about security, the private browsing option doesn't retain cookies, add items to history or downloads window, save information for autofill, or retain a history of your Google searches. Additionally, when you click a link on a Web page that links to a PDF file, Safari downloads the file and displays it inline, right inside the browser window.

With the new HTML formatting support in Mail, it is simple to send the contents of a Web page with perfect fidelity right from Safari. You can also archive Web pages to save for the future. Finally, parental controls are built into Safari to allow you to limit your child's browsing to just the Web sites you select.

CIOL: How secure is Safari compared with the other browsers?





DS: Apple's engineers designed Safari to be secure. Among many features like robust encryption, support for SSL versions 2 and 3, and Transport Layer Security (TLS), Safari also lets you use standards-based authentication such as Kerberos single sign-on and X.509 personal certificates, or proprietary protocols like NTLMv2 to log in to secure sites.

Safari protects your personal information on shared or public Macs when surfing the Web. Using Safari's new Private Browsing feature, no information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached. It's as if you were never there.

Safari has built-in Parental Controls that allows you to specify exactly which Web sites your children access. With Safari Parental Controls enabled, your kids browse only the sites on the Bookmarks Bar. New Web addresses typed into the address field or non-approved sites linked from approved sites will not load on Safari. Instead, an error message appears, giving your child the option to request approval on blocked pages.

Finally, Safari's security is enhanced by the secure foundation of Mac OS X. Safari can tell the difference between a file and a program, and alerts you whenever you are downloading the latter. All Web downloads that require installation, must receive an explicit approval from users. In order for the software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you would have to type in your password and approve changes to your system. Safari and Mac OS X work hand-in-hand to provide a secure browsing experience.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on the usage of KHTML technology for Safari?

DS: At the core of Apple's Safari Web browser is WebKit, which is an open source Web browser engine. WebKit is used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other Mac OS X applications. It is because of WebKit that Safari can render Web pages blazingly fast. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. And best of all, Webkit is Open Source.

CIOL: How will the developer community benefit from Safari? If yes, can you share an example?

DS: Safari is one of the most standards-compliant Web browsers ever built. Thus, your best bet for ensuring that your pages render properly in Safari, today's version and beyond, is to follow Web standards. If it runs on Safari, it'll probably run anywhere else. You will also guarantee optimal rendering in Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer (IE) for Macintosh. Of course, each one of these Web browsers has its own minor quirks or legitimate differences of interpretation, so testing your site across all of them is still mandatory.

By comparison, IE for Windows, the most popular Web browser for the Windows OS, often requires Web developers to use a number of non-standard tricks or to accept layout differences. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. So, for now, Web developers have to work around these problems. Apple has a specific section devoted to developers that covers Safari topics of interest to Web developers and Web publishers.

CIOL: Is Safari compatible with Vista and other operating systems?

DS: Yes. It is compatible with Windows Vista. Safari 3 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500MHz Intel Pentium processor.

CIOL: Surveys say that 90 percent of Web users use MS IE. What are the new offerings that Apple is offering to attract users to use Safari?





DS: In the first 48 hours of its launch, more than 1 million copies of Safari for Windows were downloaded. The speed of Safari, combined with an intuitive user interface and ease-of-use are its attractive features. Safari lets users spend more time surfing the Web and less time waiting for pages to load. Other Safari features now available to Windows users include SnapBack, one-click access to an initial search query; resizable text fields; and Private Browsing to ensure that information about an individual's browsing history isn't stored.

Safari 3 supports all modern Internet standards so that users can view Web sites as they were meant to be seen, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java. Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple's Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.