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Despite Popularity, Top Browsers Can Still Have Flaws

Matthew Tilmann — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:59:47 -0600

Despite their recent popularity, browser behemoths Safari and Firefox have also been found to be the most vulnerable to attacks according to a recent study from this week.

The study found that of the 3,100 exploits that were tracked by researchers, 44 percent were able to break through and attack Firefox, while only 15 percent would work within Internet Explorer. Safari was not far behind, at 35 percent.

The reason for Safari's large share was due in part to Apple including it on its iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

Apple has been quick to work on fixing these exploits through recent patchwork within the iPhone operating system.

Safari 4.0.4 is Ready for Download

Roberto Baldwin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:46:43 -0600

Check Software Update on your Mac, Apple has released the latest Safari update.

Here is what Apple has to say about Safari 4.0.4:

This update is recommended for all Safari users and includes improvements to performance, stability, and security including:

- Improved JavaScript performance
- Improved Full History Search performance for users with a large number of history items
- Stability improvements for 3rd-party plug-ins, the search field and Yahoo! Mail

For detailed information on the security content of this update, please visit this site: About Apple Security Updates.

You can download the update here.

Safari 4 Keeps Crashing!

Scott Rose — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:03:30 -0500

I upgraded to Safari 4 once it was out of beta--or so I thought. This thing crashes all the time! Every time I open it, almost, it freezes up and I have to force-quit. Sometimes this happens a few times before my startup page will actually load. My friend who did use the Safari 4 beta and then upgraded to the final release says that, for him, the beta was actually more stable! I do have SafariStand installed, even though I never use it--could that be the problem? I don’t see an option in the preferences to uninstall it. Can you help, or should I go back to Firefox?

We sympathize with your frustration, having experienced the same chronic issue with Safari freezing up on launch. Nothing is more annoying than a Web browser that refuses to browse the Web, huh? The morning we read your email, Software Update had an update to Safari (version 4.0.2), so try that and see if it makes things work a little better.

If that doesn’t help, your next move should be to uninstall SafariStand, since you don’t use it much anyway. (For readers unfamiliar with SafariStand, it’s a SIMBL plug-in that adds more menu items to Safari, like killing animated GIFs, altering sites’ appearances, and a lot more.) Look for a file called SafariStand.bundle in Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins. Delete it and restart Safari, and you should be good to go. Since doing both of those things, we’ve gone from Safari locking up while loading the homepage 60 percent of the time to almost never.

How to delete SafariStand: Find this file, delete it, and restart Safari.

If you get Safari 4 working again and find you miss SafariStand, head to hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html and download a new Safari 4–compatible version, available for Tiger and Leopard Macs. The plug-in is freeware.

OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

Michelle Delio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:59:34 -0500

No matter how happy you are with your current Web browser, chances are you’ve wondered if another browser would make your Web wanderings faster, easier, or at least a little more festive. We speculate about that too (probably far too often), so we decided to run some tests, compare features and figure out which browser currently rules the Web.

The Lineup

Browsers are powered by engines which transform a raw mess of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a more or less tidy website. Mac browsers typically use the Mozilla Gecko or Webkit engines. Opera uses its own proprietary engine, Presto.

Current releases of Mozilla Gecko-based browsers for the Mac include:

Firefox 3.5.1: Once the geeky alternative, now almost mainstream, known for its customizability
Flock 2.5: A browser for the socially-minded Mac user
Camino 1.6.8: Firefox, basically, but tweaked for Macs

Current Webkit-based browsers include:

Safari 4.0.2: Apple’s very own browser.
Stainless 0.6.5: Cool features for the technically inclined (under development).
Cruz 0.2: For the social networker who likes to multi-task (under development).

If a browser has not yet reached version 1.0, we didn’t include it in our overall benchmark scoring as it could have skewed the results. Early-stage stripped-down betas can appear superfast, and could lack some functions that can skew benchmark-based comparisons.

Testing Methodology

To gauge basic performance levels we used Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript testing suite which aggregates a number of tools including Dromaeo, Apple's SunSpider suite and Google's V8. We measured CPU/Memory usage with iStat pro. Streaming video playback was determined by comparing how smoothly the same set of three YouTube videos played in each browser.

We installed freshly-downloaded copies of each browser and tested on a Mac Pro (2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 8GB of SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7) and a MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7). Each browser ran in its default configuration with no third-party plug-ins and a minimum set of bookmarks. That’s the closest we could get to creating a level playing field but there’s a flaw here: over long-term usage, a browser’s performance may slow as information is added to its database, extensions can also bog things down.

Bottom line: Benchmarks are not the Voice of God. There are too many variables that come into play, such as network latency when testing browsers. And while a sluggish but feature-rich application is not a good application, features and functionality matter far more to most of us than whether a browser can load 15 tabs a few fractions of a second faster than another browser.

Test results

General Performance:

Overall, Safari was the fastest of all the browsers we tested, with Camino a hair behind Safari.

Firefox exhibited the slowest startup times of any tested browser, but beats Safari by an average of two seconds in speedy page rendering, primarily due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Opera was a bit faster than Firefox on start-up times but really shone in the tab-tests -- opening up eight, and then 15 tabs faster (but we’re talking percents of seconds here) than the other browsers. Safari was the next fastest on the tab test, with Firefox and Camino neck in neck near the back of the pack.

Flock didn’t score well at all, coming in dead last in all tests but its capabilities not its performance are what makes this browser attractive to some.

Resource Usage We tested each browser by opening 15 tabs -- nine of them flash-heavy -- and checked CPU and memory usage in iStat pro after 10, 20, and 30 minutes.

Firefox, Safari and Opera did the best on this test; Firefox showed 9% CPU utilization at 30 minutes, Safari and Opera had consumed 11%. Camino was in second-to-last place, with a 13% CPU utilization score. Flock ate up the most resources, spiking to 15% on occasion.

None of the browsers gobbled enough resources to create a performance lags in other applications or the browser.

NEXT: Video Playback, Features Compared and Your Next Browser.

Video Playback:

All of the browsers rendered good playback of three YouTube videos, with the glaring exception of Firefox 3.5.1 which stuttered disturbingly. Having run into this issue before, we were not surprised; some folks suspect the problem is due to Firefox’s crash recovery system which takes frequent snapshots of the browser’s state. (In case you’re experiencing this problem, a previous experiment in about:config changing the browser.sessionstore.interval from 10000 to 120000 alleviated the issue somewhat, but not entirely.)

The Results

Looking at all these scores as a whole, Safari is leading the pack but there’s just not enough of a significant difference to crown one browser as the ultimate for everyday use. So let’s have a look at what features each contender offers:

Firefox: Firefox has morphed from the scrappy little renegade browser to a solid -- dare we say unexciting? -- workhorse. Not that this is a bad thing, Firefox 3.5.3 manages to combine stable, fast performance with the widest range of user-customizable features of any browser. None of Firefox’s newer features are astounding (TraceMonkey is its biggest tech advantage) it’s the ability to tweak every component of the browser that is its main technical appeal. If you don’t love tinkering with settings and plug-ins and scripts, it’s difficult to make a case for Firefox over Safari on a Mac.

Camino: So you like Firefox, but wish it was more Mac-like? Download Camino and you’ll have a 100% open source browser, built on the Gecko engine and optimized for use on Macs. You can access native Mac OS X features such as the services menu and system Keychain. Camino 1.6.9 offers Firefox’s uber-customability, built-in Flashblock and “Annoyance Control” pop-up stopper, Session Restore and other Firefox-like features for a solid but bloat-free browser that often delivers better performance on Macs than the Fox. (Camino 2.0 Beta 3 is already reasonably stable and includes some great features: enhanced AppleScript capabilities, Growl notifications for completed downloads, drag and drop tabs, and the ability to disable "Block Flash animation" on a per-site basis). The only thing that’s missing: Camino doesn’t have a built-in RSS feed reader, it hands off feeds to the reader of your choice.

Safari: If you’re running Leopard on your Mac, you’ll likely get the best overall performance from Safari or Camino. Among Safari’s recently introduced features, you’ll either love Cover Flow, a 3D view of your most frequently accessed web pages or dismiss it as eye candy. In general, we find the starred indications of new content useful, but would prefer to choose the sites displayed in Cover Flow rather than have them automatically populated. Safari’s full history search (look on the lower right-hand corner of the Top Sites window) makes it easy to find sites you’ve visited before, even if you only remember a word or two that appeared on the page. Private browsing keeps your strolls through the Web’s less brightly lit neighborhoods off the grid. Safari supports plug-ins, but is less customizable than Firefox.

Opera: Poor little Opera really doesn’t get the attention it deserves, possibly because some people still think you have to pay to get a copy and it doesn’t appeal to geeky early adopters as it isn’t open source. It’s a shame because Opera 10 boasts super-snappy performance and is packed with great features including Speed Dial, which serves the same purpose as Safari’s Top Sites but is far more configurable, built-in page compression to speed page downloads over slow or cruddy connections, a nice-looking tab bar that suits wide screen monitors and displays pretty thumbnails of each tab’s contents and a great email client, etc. Try Opera 10 with Opera Unite, which adds a streamlined web server to Opera for media sharing. We just wish that it had a privacy mode.

Flock: Flock is for the extroverts among us, as well as introverts who are pretending to be the sort of people that need people. It’s a tad sluggish compared to Safari, Opera and Firefox/Camino, but it excels at social networking. To share content you drag and drop photos, videos, URLs, chunks of text or whatever else onto a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar. You can update your own Facebook newsfeed in a similar fashion, and drag content right into Facebook chats. Twitter Search is baked in, and FlockCast lets you post to multiple locations simultaneously, type a URL in a Twitter message and Flock automatically shortens it, and etc. It really is a well-thought out browser for its target audience. But unless you make a living doing social media, you might want to boot up another browser for the days when you actually have to get work done.

Your Next Browser

Google Chrome: Chrome for OS X comes with a stern warning that it’s not at all suitable for daily use from stability and functionality standpoints. And while we’re used to Google’s offerings being Beta forever, this one really is in its early days. It’s impossible to predict how the final version will measure up to existing browsers, but it looks very promising -- the speediest browser we’ve seen so far, in fact. Each tab runs as an independent process, so if one page crashes the browser won’t throw a hissy fit. If you can set aside your bitterness over Google making us wait so long for Chrome, this browser may be your favorite once it hits version 1.0 -- maybe in a few months. Meanwhile the brave can preview it here.

Cruz: Cruz was created for OS X 10.5 Leopard and later, by Todd Ditchendorf, who also created Fluid. Todd bills it as a social networking browser but it’s also great for multi-taskers, you can create panels along each side of the central browser window and fully load websites in each panel, and you can configure links in the panels to open in the main window (or within a new tab in the main window). Fluid underpinnings provides a lot of potential options here, and the tech savvy can use scripting and plugins to make Cruz their own. It also supports session saving as well as site screenshot thumbnails, which may become more useful as more sites implement it. Cruz is a very early beta but it’s already reasonably stable.

Stainless: Stainless started life as a proof-of-concept, quickly gained fans and is slowly becoming a real browser. Now at version 0.6.5, Stainless offers features sure to delight people who thrill to the idea of things like parallel sessions -- thanks to Stainless’ use of multiprocessing, you can log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time -- a boon for those of us who have multiple accounts that we can’t log into in one tab without being logged out in the other. Like Chrome, each tab runs as an independent process. Stainless also boasts a porn private browsing mode, a 'Bookmark Shelf' that lets you park favicon links on the sides of the browser window, and session aware bookmarking. Its developers freely admit this is not a browser for everyday use yet (and in testing Stainless did create a lockup that required a hard boot to clear) but it looks promising and is a little speed demon on multi-core machines.

Google Chrome: Still Smokin

J Keirn-Swanson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:55:33 -0500

In recent benchmarking tests performed by CNET, the latest version of Google's Chromium (its developer title) buried the competition. In a SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, Chromium busted through with a 657ms final time, compared to 886ms for Safari, 1,508ms for Firefox, and Opera coming in at an embarrassingly slow 5,958ms.

In layman's terms, for loading and rendering pages that rely on JavaScript (which is a lot), Chromium smoked Safari and Firefox. Opera fared roughly as well as a tricycle would at the Indy 500.

And when it comes to Acid3's standards-compliancy tests, Chromium scored a perfect 100/100.

But wait, there's more.

Extensions and themes, long complained about as one of Chrome's greatest shortcomings, are slowly making their way into the builds. The most recent themes allowable were simple, worked across all platforms, and point towards the future universality of other goodies. The Google Chromium blog discusses some relevant issues as well as the eventual opening of a gallery of extensions much like Firefox has long had that will allow for user ratings and updates.

While the Chrome folks still haven't nailed Flash video rendering, they appear to be getting there. That this should be such an issue for the owners of YouTube is almost comically bizarre, but issues with the Flash plug-in aren't unique to Google's browser. HTML codec universality can't come fast enough (and we may never get there).

While the competition for the fastest browser will never be definitively won, the rivalry and the developer builds that push the envelope can only be good news for consumers. If Safari is your browser of choice, the Google team is only spurring the Mac developers to make your browser even faster. Likewise Firefox. Opera fans, I don't know what to tell you, but I'm sorry.

Apple Updates Safari to 4.0.3, Fixes Issues

Cory Bohon — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:29:30 -0500

Today Apple updated Safari to version 4.0.3, adding fixes for iWork.com among other things. According to Software Update it "is recommended for all Safari users and includes improvements to stability, compatibility and security." The update details the following improvements:

- Stability improvements for webpages that use the HTML 5 video tag
- Fixes an issue that prevented some users from logging into iWork.com
- Fixes an issue that could cause web content to be displayed in greyscale instead of color

They also added some security updates for WebKit. You can get this update by opening Software Update (Apple menu > Software Update) or by downloading the installer package from the Apple website.

Safari Search Tips

Scott Rose — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:47:03 -0500

I’m trying to switch from Firefox to Safari 3, because I want to keep my bookmarks in sync between Safari on my Mac and Safari on my iPhone. But so far I’m not a fan of Safari’s Google search box, compared to Firefox’s. Do you know any keyboard shortcuts or other tricks for it, to speed up my acclimation process a little?

We agree with you that Safari’s anemic search box (which can only search Google, unlike Firefox’s, which can also check Yahoo, IMDb, Amazon, ESPN, and numerous other search engines) takes some getting used to. But Safari’s got a couple of tricks up its sleeve regarding that search box. Press Command-Option-F to instantly jump your cursor right to that box, ready to type in a new search. Pressing Return, of course, brings you to your search results at google.com, but as you navigate away from the search-results page, you can click a little orange arrow in that search box to send the browser back to the search results page where you started.

Click the orange arrow to snap back to your Google search results for the term in the search box.

Apple Updates Safari to 4.0.2, Provides Security Fixes

Cory Bohon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:12:04 -0500

Apple fixes two security risks and improves compatibility in an update provided to Safari 4.0 users today. The update, which weighs in at 40MBs for Leopard users "improves the stability of the Nitro JavaScript engine and includes the latest compatibility and security fixes."

The security update portion of Safari 4.0.2 will fix two security risks, one of which could allow an attacker to use cross-site scripting on maliciously coded sites. You can read more about the security update on the Apple knowledge base.

Apple is recommending this update to all Safari 4.0 users, and because of the security fixes, we would recommend it as well. You can download the update by opening Software Update on your Mac (Apple menu > Software Update), or by visiting the Apple Support Downloads website and downloading the installer package.