Google and other leading advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users, reports the Wall Street Journal. Using “a special code,” the companies were able to bypass the browser’s privacy restrictions and install cookies on a user’s computer, even when such actions were supposed to be blocked. Companies such as Google use cookies to track browsing habits across websites that it places advertisements on. Apple’s Safari Web browser blocks these third-party cookies by default, only allowing them on a website that a user directly interacts with. Read on for more.

The Journal’s research found that this “special code” was present in 22 of the top 100 websites when browsing from a computer, and 23 sites when using the iPhone’s browser. The publication notes that “once the coding was activated, it could enable Google tracking across the vast majority of websites.”

The Mountain View-based company has maintained its innocence, claiming its advertising cookies do not collect personal information. “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information,” responded a Google representative.

Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group and PointRoll all employed a similar code for tracking. Out of all the companies, Google has the largest market share, delivering Internet ads that were viewed at least once by 93% of all U.S. Web users in December. Apple reached out to The Journal and informed the publication that the company is “working to put a stop” to codes that bypass Safari’s privacy settings.

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With each major iOS update, one of the stock Apps that keeps getting better is Apple’s Safari Mobile web browser. More features and faster browsing are regular and welcome additions. With iOS 5, the latest improvements to mobile Safari are well worth mentioning.

Better performance

Both major and minor iOS updates have steadily improved upon the performance of the mobile Safari browser, and iOS 5 is no exception. Here are the benchmarks below, where you can see iOS 5 has the clear advantage on every device.

Background links

This has to be the one feature of mobile Safari I’ve wanted the most, and for the longest time: The ability to browse more than one link at a time.  To set this up, you will need to set the Safari preference to open links in background on the iPhone, or to open new tabs in background on the iPad.  Once that is set, you basically tap and hold on a URL and direct it to open in the background, so as not to interrupt your reading.

Tab bar on iPad

While not having a tab bar on the iPhone and iPod touch versions of mobile Safari may make sense due to space constraints, there is certainly enough space on the iPad for a tab bar. With iOS 5, you now have that tab bar in Safari on the iPad.  This makes background links that much more powerful.

Safari Reader

One of the coolest features of Safari on the Mac is being able to remove all of the ads and formatting on a given page to streamline content.  This feature has now been added to mobile Safari on both the iPhone and the iPad.  You’ll now notice that iconic “Reader” button next to the URL on the toolbar. Tapping it takes you to a stripped down version of the page you’re viewing.

Reading List

Saving an article to read more closely at a later time is always a good thing to do. Other options exist, but sometimes all you really need is just a way to create a quick temporary bookmark. Safari’s reading list is just that, a way to create temporary bookmarks that sync across all of your iOS and Mac devices. Ideal for saving a long article on your iPhone for later reading on your iPad.

Private browsing

This could certainly come in handy when connecting to a Wi-Fi access point that you aren’t familiar with. It can be configured in the Safari preferences. Having to go through preferences is a little awkward, and the first time you set it up, you will be prompted to close any open tabs or pages. Still, could be useful depending on your needs.

Quick access to back history

This one is an iPad-only feature as well.  Simply tap and hold either the back or the forward button on the browser toolbar to eatable the history list of each associated direction.

Tweet a link

With Apple integrating Twitter into iOS directly, you can now Tweet from places you could only dream of Tweeting before.  Once such place is in mobile Safari.  You can now Tweet the link of the page you are currently viewing.

Streaming video

It use to be that you could only stream video directly from the YouTube or the iPod app directly. If you happened to be viewing a video embedded on a web page, even if that vide was a YouTube video, you couldn’t stream it to an Apple TV. Now you can.

That’s a list of what Apple added to a single app. This really is one of the most ambitious software updates it’s ever introduced. Stay tuned for more coverage.

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Popular Android third-party browser Dolphin has a new version out Monday for the iPad. Dolphin HD, like its iPhone counterpart released earlier this month, is free and brings a number of features not available in mobile Safari. But will users embrace an alternative that can never be the default, no matter how well conceived?

What Dolphin HD gets right

Dolphin HD has a number of smart features that make it an attractive alternative to Apple’s Safari and other third-party browser options. There’s quick access to full-screen browsing with any site, speed dial for commonly visited site, the Webzine for curating your own multi-source news feed and gesture controls for navigating between pages, tabs and bookmarks.

Some of those features are definitely hits. The full screen button is great for reading without distractions, or for viewing rich-media content undisturbed by browser chrome. And the Webzine feature is cool enough to be its own app, akin to something like a simpler, but still quite effective, manually curated Flipboard. Webzine lets you either manually add or choose from a list of text-heavy sources like the New York Times  or GigaOM and then presents its content in more of a magazine-style layout.

Swiping left and right to call up bookmarks and a list of your open tabs is also a nice touch, although the actual gesture controls themselves and the clumsy implementation of said feature aren’t ideal and usually it’s easier to just tap a button or open a menu to accomplish the same tasks.

Overall though, Dolphin HD is great. It looks good, the tabs on tap layout works much better for browsing than the iOS implementation of multi-page browsing, and most of the features mentioned above make browsing the web a much smoother experience.

What Dolphin HD is still missing

Unfortunately despite the smart additions, Dolphin is still lacking considerably in one major regard: Like every other third-party browser on the iPad, it can only ever really play second fiddle to mobile Safari. That’s because it can’t be set as the default option for opening websites from Mail and other apps — and honestly, that’s really the main job of an iOS browser these days thanks to the rising influence of apps when it comes to mobile Internet usage. There’s also the fact that it’s really just a skin for mobile Safari. Apple insists even third-party browsers use its engine, so there’s little developers can do beyond adding their own features and interface, unless the offload page rendering to remote servers, like Opera Mini.

Think about it this way: If you open a link in Twitter that you find interesting and you want to read more, will you just use the “open in Safari” button or actually take the time to copy the address, open Dolphin HD and paste it in the address bar? Chances are you’ll take the path of least resistance like most other mobile users appear to be doing.

A winner waiting for competition

Dolphin HD is a solid experience on the iPad, as are the iPhone and Android versions. Luckily, the developers have included Webzine, too, which gives users a reason to check it out beyond browsing. But until Apple opens up the coveted default browser spot to offerings from other developers, the triumph of Dolphin HD remains a fairly hollow one.

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New York Post blocks iPad access through Safari browser, hopes you’ll pay for a subscription instead originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve tried all the browsers you can possibly think of, but I’ve always ended up going back to Safari after a while, because it offered a better experience. Today’s release of Firefox 4 may be able to change that pattern.

The latest version of Mozilla’s browser includes a lot of new features, including tabs-on-top (a feature many people missed when it was removed from the Safari beta), App Tabs (similar to Google Chrome’s pinned tabs) and a new full screen mode. All are features which aren’t present in Safari, and ones that have me eager to stick with Firefox 4 for the long haul.

Firefox's Full Screen mode offers distraction-free browsing.

Of course, there are some features of Safari which Firefox doesn’t offer; the Reader view for one, but I rarely use it anyway, and there are plugins that can take its place. I also like the fact that Safari is based on WebKit, which enables some pretty nice effects on the web such as fading and other animations, but these aren’t yet widely implemented. So far, the benefits seem to outweigh the pitfalls.

One of my favorite new features is the App Tabs part of Firefox. This allows you to pin a certain tab to the tab bar so that it has a permanent place in your browser. This is great since you can have a bunch of these open and they take up hardly any space in the tab bar.

Another new feature is the Tab Groups, which takes a bit of time to set up, but is incredibly useful once it’s done. You can organise your tabs into groups, and then those groups can be manipulated as one, letting you do things like close an entire group of tabs simultaneously. You can resize and drag groups to arrange them however you like. I find that looking for a specific tab is much easier when I have 10 or 15 tabs open if I can look in these groups. It’s nowhere near as easy as this if you’re using Safari.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 is significantly faster than the previous version, but I haven’t noticed much difference. However, I have noticed that scrolling in webpages seems to be a lot smoother in version 4. There are also a lot of UI effects which add to the experience; new tabs ‘slide’ into existence rather than simply appearing. Safari doesn’t offer such a smooth experience, in my opinion.

Even though Safari 5 introduced Extensions, the Firefox Add-Ons library is a lot larger and offers a greater range of add-ons than you can get for Safari. For example, the Tab Badge add-on offers something unavailable to Safari users: a badge in the tab bar alerting you to new content, such as a new message on Facebook.

Overall, I’ve found that so far, Firefox 4 offers a better browsing experience than Safari. Unless Safari gets a major update, I won’t be switching back anytime soon. Which browser do you prefer?

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Google renewed a heated discussion when it said it was dropping H.264 support from Chrome’s HTML5 video tag last week, but it seems the company’s ready and willing to push its WebM alternative video format hard — not only is hardware decoder IP now available for the VP8 codec, but the project team is presently readying WebM plug-ins for Safari and Internet Explorer 9, neither of which include it themselves. As to the little matter of whether any of this is the right move for the web at large, we’ll paraphrase what Google had to say for itself: H.264 licenses cost money; Firefox and Opera don’t support H.264 either; and big companies like Google are helping the little guy by championing this open alternative. We have to say, the eternal optimist in us is cheering them on. Oh, and the linguist in us, too. Read Google’s own words at our source link, and decide for yourself.

Google defends H.264 removal from Chrome, says WebM plug-ins coming to Safari and IE9 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ll admit to having been pretty flighty about my choice of browsers in the past. Camino one month, Safari the next, Chrome the week after; I’ve been jumping from one browser to the next, chasing performance and features for quite a while now.

Recently though, I’ve made a commitment to spend less time worrying about what other tools might have to offer, and more time exploring the potential of those right in front of me. For good or ill, I’m casting my lot with Safari, and making sure I get the most from it.

Learn the Shortcuts

Like the guy in the movie says, “Learn them, know them, live them.” Shortcuts get you where you want to go, only faster. There are tons of shortcuts available in Safari. If you want to have a look at them all, there’s actually an HTML doc with an exhaustive list bundled right in with the browser. Setting out to learn them all at once would probably do more harm than good, so here’s a list of essentials to get you off to a good start:

• Tabs. I usually end up with a lot of tabs in my windows, so being able to deal with them without leaving the keyboard is nice. Pressing Control+Tab will select the next tab in the window, while pressing Command+W will close the current one.
• Bookmark(let)s. I’ll talk about some essential bookmarklets a bit later, but pressing Command+1 will activate the first bookmark, Command+2 the second, and so on.
• Opening Links. I’ll often just read through a page, clicking on interesting links and letting them load into tabs in the background while I continue on. To do this I’ve set my preferences to open links in new tabs on Command+Click. This is one of the few keyboard commands I’ve actually got mapped to my Magic Mouse, where it’s a three finger click (mapping gestures on the Magic Mouse requires a third-party tool like Better Touch Tool).
• Navigating Search. The next one isn’t strictly a Safari shortcut, but it really works well with all the rest. On its experiments page, Google has a Keyboard Shortcuts option that lets you navigate through the list of Google results using your keyboard. The J key selects the next result, and the K key will select the previous one. Combine this with Safari’s Search Results Snap Back ( Command+Option+S ) which will jump back to the last Google results page viewed in the tab, and I can go from TextMate to search results and back, all without touching the mouse.
• Reading. In other browsers, I’ve used the great Readability bookmarklet to pull out text content from a site. It gets rid of all the clutter on the page and loads the text of the article into a nice, easy-to-read layout. In Safari 5, this is baked right into the browser; you can toggle this Reader mode by pressing Command+Shift+R. For scrolling, simply pressing the Spacebar will scroll to the end of your current view, while Shift+Spacebar will scroll up.
• Address Bar. This last one is simple but important. Pressing Command+L puts focus on the address bar and selects its contents. I use this all the time for quickly grabbing a copy of the current URL, for entering a new one, or in combination with a press of the Tab key to get to the search field.

Plugins and Extensions

When it comes to plugins and extensions, I’d prefer to have none if I could. Maybe that’s just because every Add-On you installed used to slow Firefox down when that browser first came out. It’s less of a problem these days, but I still like to keep my plugin library short.

• Click to Flash. This is a “must have” in my opinion. Simply put, it blocks all unwanted Flash objects on the screen until I want them; when I do, I just click on the placeholder to load the Flash.
• 1Password. Another “must have” as far as I’m concerned. 1Password helps me get a handle on all my credentials by generating and remembering complex passwords for me.
• Ultimate Status Bar. This nice little extension gives Safari an auto-hiding, Chrome-style status bar that disappears when it’s not needed. It can also expand shortened URLs and display file size info.
• Type to Navigate. Type to Navigate lets me type the text of any link on the page to select and then open it. Pressing Command+G selects the next instance of the text on the screen and Command+Shift+G selects the previous. As a bonus, I can also press Command+I when focused on a link to send it to Instapaper. The potential for this one is huge, though I’ve noticed a couple pages it can’t quite seem to navigate

There is a crazy number of Extensions available for Safari these days, so do have a look and find the ones that best suit your needs.

Hidden Preferences

There’s one hidden preference that’s a required setting for me: forcing tabs. I hate having a bunch of new windows always popping up, so I set this option to force all new window links to open up in new tabs instead. To enable this, just open up Terminal.app (in your Utilities folder) and use the defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -boolean command.

Bookmarklets

I manage all my proper bookmarks over at Pinboard, but I do have a few key bookmarklets that I need to make sure are available from Safari:

• Read Later. This one sends the current URL over to Instapaper for later reading. I use it any time I come across something I know I’ll want to read when I get the chance.
• Send to Pukka. I use Pukka to manage all my bookmarks over at Pinboard. This bookmarklet sends the current URL, along with any selected text on the page over to Pukka, creating a new bookmark on Pinboard using the selected text for the description.

I’ll probably add a new shortcut or two as I need them, but for the most part, I’m happy with the functionality this provides. I spend so much time in the browser these days that it only makes sense to learn to be as efficient with it as I can. No matter which browser you use, do yourself a favor and take some time to learn the shortcuts, explore the preferences, and find the add-ons that best suit your needs.

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I’ve used Safari as my default browser since 2008, but lately I’ve decided to give Google Chrome a shot at becoming my new standby. The main reason I chose to give Chrome a chance was that one of the sites I use every day loads like molasses in Safari, yet loads quickly in Chrome.

Since I know some of you are going to mention Firefox, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve ruled it out. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll use Firefox on Windows, but on a Mac it’s just… weird. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Interface

I suppose Chrome has an attractive interface, but I do think it looks better on Windows, partly because it feels designed for it rather than OS X (look at Chrome’s bookmarks manager and you’ll see what I mean). It just looks better with Aero.

Some aspects of Chrome’s tabs implementation annoy me. Mostly, I’m pretty happy with them, but there are two drawbacks. One being that, because the tabs take up the title bar, there’s less room to drag the window. This isn’t a problem for people who maximize their browser windows, but I like to keep my windows a certain size and I move them around a lot, since I’m always dragging images onto my desktop.

Another side effect of having the tabs in the title bar means that Chrome’s title bar doesn’t really function like one; you never actually see the full title of a web page unless it fits within the tab, which seems like a small complaint, but it’s still annoying.

Features

There were several features I missed from Safari when I switched to Chrome. Probably the one I missed most was Safari’s Reader view, which lets you reformat a long passage of text in an attractive drop-down that cuts out the clutter.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for Chrome that mimics Reader, and actually surpasses it in some ways. The extension’s called iReader and is available in the Chrome extensions gallery. When you hit the arrow keys to scroll through something in Reader for Safari, the cursor doesn’t disappear like it does in normal web pages, but it does in the iReader extension, which is less distracting for me.

Speaking of extensions, there aren’t any extensions I’ve come across for Chrome that aren’t available for Safari, or that I absolutely can’t live without. The opposite isn’t true. In fact, one of the unofficial Safari extensions that I love, ClickToFlash, isn’t available for Chrome, and it looks like that’ll be the case for some time.

Performance

It’s almost a crapshoot here. I can tell you that using Chrome feels faster than using Safari, but only a little. They both use the same rendering engine, WebKit, but they use different JavaScript engines, and from what I’ve learned about both Safari’s Nitro and Chrome’s V8, V8 is superior, but the difference in speed is also small.

On the interface performance side, I’ve noticed that when I have about six tabs open in Chrome, dragging the tabs around gets laggy. I don’t experience this lag with Safari, which I think has the best implementation of tab-dragging in any browser.

Bugs

I can generally say that I’ve experienced more bugs in Chrome than I have in Safari. For instance, in Chrome, almost every time I go back to a Google search result from, say, a Wikipedia page, the page doesn’t display and I’m left with the cute little dead tab face, then I have to re-enter the search in Google. It’s almost a deal-breaker for me.

There are other bugs, of course, but none that are as annoying or pervasive as the above.

Security

Chrome wins here, bar none. Safari is notorious for being a vector of vulnerability attacks, having famously been hacked in just 10 seconds at the annual Pwn2Own contest in 2009, while Chrome was the only browser that wasn’t hacked. However, security isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome, as there’s very little chance I’d get a virus anyway, since there aren’t many viruses developed for the Mac and I’m a pretty safe surfer.

Will I stay with Chrome?

After using Chrome for a couple of weeks and getting accustomed to all its quirks on the Mac, I’ve decided to switch back to Safari. There just isn’t enough reason for me to stick with Chrome, and the Google search bug mentioned above is a huge annoyance, one that outweighs the poor performance of Safari on the one page that had me considering a switch to begin with.

Did I make the right choice? How’s your experience with Chrome been?

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Just released from Apple, Safari 5.0.2 addresses a few usability issues, as well as three security flaws that might get your Mac or PC pwned. For general usage, Safari 5.0.2:

• Fixes an issue that could prevent users from submitting web forms
• Fixes an issue that could prevent web content displaying correctly with Google Image results when Flash 10.1 is installed
• Establishes an encrypted, authenticated connection to the Safari Extensions Gallery

Two of the three security issues affect both Safari for OS X and Windows. As usual, the exploits can occur when “visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.” Beyond that, the WebKit flaws relate to floating point data handling and run-in styling.

The third security issue is for Windows and sounds a lot like DLL load hijacking, “opening a file in a directory that is writable by other users may lead to arbitrary code execution.” HD Moore of Metasploit explains it more clearly.

Essentially, if you open a file type associated with [a vulnerable app] from a remote network share, the application will also try to load one more DLLs from the share, Moore explained. Even if the file that the user opened is completely safe, a malicious DLL can be supplied that will lead to code execution.

Because no user interaction is required, other than questionable web surfing choices, it’s strongly recommended Safari users update as soon as possible.

Apple has also released Safari 4.1.2 for OS X 10.4.

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