SlashGear » IE8

Apple Safari 4: crash-resistant and 7.8x faster than IE8

Chris Davies — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:54:27 +0000

It wasn’t all hardware at Apple’s WWDC 2009 event: Safari 4, the company’s browser, finally came out of beta, and Phil Schiller saved some fighting talk for all web rivals. According to Apple, Safari 4 is 7.8x faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, and passes all 100 of the Acid 3 tests while IE8 languishes behind at 21/100.

Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant, thanks to a new way of handling plugins. According to Apple, plugins are the number one cause of browser crashes; by splitting them off as a separate process, should the plugins fail the browser itself will continue to run.

Other changes include Cover Flow review of the browser history and full Spotlight search. Safari 4 is available to download now, for Leopard, Tiger and Windows systems.

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Internet Explorer 8 official release today

Chris Davies — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:51:08 +0000

Internet Explorer 8 will finally see its public release today, as Microsoft roll out the new version of the browser from 12pm EDT. After several months of public testing, IE8 will bring faster browsing – almost 50-percent on some sites compared to other software, claim Microsoft – together with new usability shortcuts called “accelerators”, such as a right-click to search or map feature.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has apparently concentrated on security, with IE8 reportedly blocking between two and four times as much malware as its rivals, and privacy. A new “InPrivate” mode provides an anonymous browsing option.

Apple announced Safari 4 for Mac and PC back in February, which made significant performance claims about its JavaScript engine versus that in IE8. More recently, Google released a new Chrome beta that is more speedy than their current mainstream release.

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Safari hacked in seconds; IE8 & Firefox fall soon after

Chris Davies — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:44:24 +0000

Security researcher Charlie Miller has shown how he can hack into a MacBook notebook in a matter of seconds, via a Safari exploit that currently remains unaddressed. The demonstration was part of Pwn2Own 2009, a competition in which hackers attempt to break various platforms in the fastest time possible, taking away both a prize fund (in Miller’s case $10,000) and the machine they hacked.

The exploit was performed on a fully-patched Apple MacBook, and presented users with a single link which, when clicked, allowed Miller to take control of the notebook. Full details of the hack have been acquired by the TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative, which will coordinate with Apple to patch the vulnerability.

Another security researcher going by the pseudonym “Nils” later demonstrated a second Safari hack, as well as breaking through IE8 and Firefox’s defences. He took away a Sony VAIO notebook running Windows 7, together with a cash prize.

[via Guardian]

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