Safari on Omid Farhang

Google found evading Safari's privacy controls

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:31:00 +0000

The H-Online: Google and other advertising companies have been found to be deliberately evading the privacy controls of Apple’s Safari browser. The evasion was revealed in a report in the Wall Street Journal and was based on work by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer. He found that the “+1” button code added to DoubleClick advertisements also allowed a Google DoubleClick tracking code to be installed on desktop Safari on 22 of the top 100 web sites. The same happened with 23 of those 100 sites when using Safari on the iPhone.

Internet Explorer’s Share of Web Traffic Drops Below 50%

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:45:00 +0000

Mashable: Internet Explorer can no longer claim more than half of the web’s traffic, as of October, ending more than a decade of the default Microsoft browser’s reign.

Safari’s hold on 62.17% of mobile traffic has reduced IE’s overall share of web browsing, despite still claiming 52.63% of desktop traffic, according to Netmarketshare.com.

The Microsoft browser’s diminishing share (49.6%) reflects its near absence from the realms of mobile and tablet, which now make up 6% of web traffic. However, chances are, you gave up on IE long enough ago that this milestone makes you more curious as to who actually still uses the browser.

PWN2OWN – Apple v. Google v. Microsoft v. Mozilla v. BlackBerry!

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Sophos Labs Blog: If you’re interested in computer security, you’ve probably heard of PWN2OWN. It’s a competition which has become an annual fixture at the annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The competition gets its name because, as the CanSecWest organizers explain, “If you can execute arbitrary code (PWN) on these [laptops or mobile phones] through a previously undisclosed browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) exploit, you can go home with one (OWN).”

Apple’s Safari browser embarrassed at Pwn2Own, hacked in 5 seconds

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:04:00 +0000

Safari just got served. At this year’s Pwn2Own conference, security firms and enthusiasts are doing their very best to discover and deploy exploits to some of the world’s most popular browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, they’re all on the menu for conference attendees and some have definitely faired better than others. Google issued a challenge, promising $20,000 to any person or team that could crack Chrome on the conferences opening day, but the two teams scheduled to take a swing backed down. Firefox is, for the time being, still standing, and, per usual, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was taken down without much fuss. But which browser faired the worst? That would be Apple’s Safari. A French security research firm named Vulpen managed to break into Safari running on a MacBook Air in a cool five seconds. The company noted that the Safari update issued by Apple yesterday — version 5.0.4 — fixes some of the vulnerabilities, but not all. The takedown of Safari 5.0.3 used exploits that are still available in the updated code base. Go ahead Apple detractors, have a little fun in the comments section.

Popular sites (including YouPorn) caught sniffing user browser history

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:52:00 +0000

The Register: YouPorn nabbed in real-world privacy sting

Boffins from Southern California have caught YouPorn.com and 45 other sites pilfering visitors’ surfing habits in what is believed to be the first study to measure in-the-wild exploits of a decade-old browser vulnerability.

YouPorn, which fancies itself the YouTube of smut, uses JavaScript to detect whether visitors have recently browsed to PornHub.com, tube8.com and 21 other sites, according to the study. It tracked the 50,000 most popular websites and found a total of 46 other offenders, including news sites charter.net and newsmax.com, finance site morningstar.com and sports site espnf1.com.

Browser Market Share: October, 2010

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:11:00 +0000

Browser	Total Market Share
Microsoft Internet Explorer	59.26%
Firefox	22.82%
Chrome	8.47%
Safari	5.33%
Opera	2.28%
Opera Mini	0.95%
Netscape	0.63%
Konqueror	0.06%
Flock	0.05%
ACCESS NetFront	0.05%
Playstation	0.03%
Mozilla	0.03%
Obigo	0.01%
Danger Web Browser	0.00%
Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer	0.00%
Blazer	0.00%
WebTV	0.00%
BlackBerry	0.00%
ANT Galio	0.00%
Lotus Notes	0.00%
iCab	0.00%
MaxThon	0.00%

Xmarks service ends January 2011

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:05:00 +0000

Xmarks will be shutting down free browser synchronization services on January 10, 2011. For details on how to transition to recommended alternatives, consult this page.

For the full story behind the Xmarks shutdown, please read their blog post.

It’s a sad story to me!

Here I found a good article to read: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/no-more-xmarks-no/192

Browser Updates

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:32:00 +0000

The Mozilla foundation just released the popular web browser Firefox in version 3.6.9. The new version fixes overall 14 security vulnerabilities of which 10 are rated critical by the developers. Additionally, they added a new feature called “X-FRAME-OPTIONS“-header which shall help mitigating clickjacking attacks as web site owners can ensure with this header that their content isn’t inserted into other sites via frames. The update is available through the automatic update mechanism ( via the “Help” – “Search for updates” menu).

IE losing market share, Chrome gaining

Tue, 04 May 2010 11:20:00 +0000

For the first time, Microsoft’s share of the browser marked has slipped below 60 percent, according to figures from Net Applications, a Aliso Viejo, Calif., web app and metrics firm .

Browser market share:

Microsoft — 59.95 percent
Mozilla’s Firefox — 24.59 percent
Google Chrome — 6.73 percent
Apple’s Safari — 4.72 percent
Opera — 2.30 percent.

Story Here.

The big change coming to Safari 5: Kernel-level multi-processing

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:18:00 +0000

Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week — first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle’s third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser.

With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer’s open contribution.

Firefox, IE8 and Safari hacked at CanSecWest

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:38:00 +0000

In the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, security researchers and hackers quickly hacked three of the major browsers to take control of the underline operating systems.

— A German hacker who goes by the handle “Nils” used a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla’s Firefox to gain control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine.

— Peter Vreugdenhil an independent researcher from the Netherlands, used several vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to take control of a machine running a patched 64-bit Windows 7 implementation.