Posts Tagged ‘apple safari’

The third annual Pwn2Own security competition that was held at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada has come to an end on 20th March 2009, i.e. Friday and revealed the weaknesses and loopholes of all the popular web browsers. This competition was intended to offer the white hat hackers a chance to crack the codes of popular web browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari and the codes of popular smartphone operating systems.

The results are quite amazing, something that wasn’t expected. The Google Chrome and all the smartphones remained un-cracked but the Apple Safari, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox were easily hacked multiple times. Apple Safari was hacked by Charlie Miller in just a couple of seconds. This was followed by a 25 year old computer science student named Nils who demonstrated the vulnerabilities of Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox.

The contestants also tried their tricks on Google Chrome browser and BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones but failed to break into the codes of these applications. According to the TippingPoint Technologies, the sponsor of the event, the Apple iPhone 3G could be hacked using one of the Safari exploits that was already used but according to the contest rules the same bug cannot be used twice.

The results clearly reveal that the smartphone OSes are far more secure than web browsers, except Google Chrome. This definitely brings the Chrome on the top of other web browsers and is expected to outshine its rivalries in near future in terms of market share, popularity and reliability.

Apple Safari has gone through lots of criticisms since its launch. Most of the time the browser was disgraced because of its security loopholes. Safari 4, the latest version of Safari browser claims to be much more secured and reliable than its predecessors. The new iteration of the Apple Safari breaks all the obstructions and now provides more functionality and improved user interaction by supporting HTML 5 codes.

We all know that HTML is the basic language that works behind any web portal. The HTML 5 is the latest version of Hyper Text Markup Language and offers enhanced functionality and improved presentation. It offers support for audio and video tags which makes it easy for the developers to integrate the audiovisuals with the website core code easily. Safari 4 promises to support such codes along with the next-generation web standards. This means the fourth version of the browser will the best to unleash the next level of sophistication and user interaction that Web 2.0 offers.

Safari 4 offers an enhanced way of experiencing the dynamic web content such as flash animations, audio, video and much more. Of course, just like earlier versions of Safari, Safari 4 can be run on any Windows PC, be it the Samsung NC10 netbook, or the Dell Latitude XT tablet PC. Safari 4 also supports Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS 3) to offer a stupendous web site presentation. You will now experience new gradients and reflections along with some other visual elements. Apart from Apple, Mozilla has also decided to include support for HTML 5 in the future releases of Firefox.

Google is marching forward on the upgrade path. Recently this popular search engine company surprised millions of Internet users by launching its first web browser called Chrome 1.0 and now within a short time span it has upgraded the browser and released the new Alpha version called Chrome 2.0.

Chrome 2.0 has got some very significant improvements over its predecessor. It’s now more flexible, speedy, user friendly and holds loads of useful functions. You can now get tools like auto complete text fields, full page zoom, enhanced spelling checker and improved auto scroll function. According to Google the alpha release of the second version of Chrome is far much reliable and faster as compared to the Chrome 1.0 and other web browsers too. It now also allows the users to import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks. On top of all these upgrades lies a unique feature called ‘Profiles’ that is not found in any of the web browsers till date. Chrome 2.0 Profiles are same as the Windows user profiles. The only difference is that here you can set and maintain different profiles for web browsing preferences such as browser settings, bookmarks, history and cookies. Clearly Google was not content with simply entering the mobile phone and mobile OS market with its G1 Android run smartphone, which is directly targeted at dethroning the Apple iPhone 3G. The Internet Search engine giant is also intent on challenging Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and of course Apple’s Safari browser.

Chrome 2.0 Alpha uses a new WebKit rendering engine that enables advanced CSS coding functions including reflections, masks, gradients, and canvas drawing. This engine is the same as the one that is used in the Apple Safari 3.1.