ANTenna Blog -- Apple

Apple has released a minor update to its Safari Web browser for Windows and Macintosh. The goal of this update is to improve security. Sadly, it seems to have improved security at the expense of stability.

The big changes in Safari 3.2, according to Apple's documentation, are targeted at Windows users. For both Windows XP and Windows Vista, there are code changes to address vulnerabilities in parsing XML documents and viewing graphics. In some cases, carefully constructed malicious XML documents and graphics files could "break" the browser's security.

It's unclear if the changes were because of inherent problems in Windows XP/Vista, or because Apple's Safari code for the Windows platform had implementation flaws.

The other change, for both Windows and Mac, is designed to help problems that might occur when someone visits a malicious Web site, such as those set up by phishers or hackers. In some cases, Safari might have been tricked into divulging sensitive information.

That all sounds good — but early comments by Safari 3.2 users indicates that the browser, which was never particularly stable (i.e., it used to hang and crash a lot), is now even less stable (i.e., it hangs and crashes more).

You can see some of the complaints on MacNN, a popular forum for Mac users. As for me, I'm sticking with the also-unstable Firefox. Every so often, I try to switch over to Safari on my Mac, but always return to Firefox after a couple of days. There are too many Web sites that just don't work right with Safari.