AtlasVPN: Apple’s Safari browser now has more than 1 billion users. “According to the findings by the Atlas VPN team, 1,006,232,879 internet users (19.16% of all internet users) now use the Safari browser, making it the second browser with over a billion users. Nevertheless, Google Chrome firmly remains at the top as the most popular browser.”
MakeUseOf: Safari: A Beginner’s Guide for iPhone or iPad Users . “On Apple devices, the default web browser is called Safari. It shares a lot of similar features to other common browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. But if you’re new to using Safari, you may feel a little lost because the interface is slightly different to the others. So, here’s a beginner’s guide on how to use the Safari app to browse the web on your iPhone or iPad.”
The Verge: Safari 15 bug can leak your recent browsing activity and personal identifiers. “A bug in Safari 15 can leak your browsing activity, and can also reveal some of the personal information attached to your Google account, according to findings from FingerprintJS, a browser fingerprinting and fraud detection service (via 9to5Mac). The vulnerability stems from an issue with Apple’s implementation of IndexedDB, an application programming interface (API) that stores data on your browser.”
CNET: Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge join forces to improve browser extensions. “The teams behind the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers have banded together to improve extensions, the add-ons you can download to customize the software. That should mean your extensions will work better and come with a better security foundation to protect you from malware.”
Lonely Planet: This website aims to find the top places for wildlife spotting in Africa. “Whether you want to tick the Big Five off your African safari bucket list or seek out specific species, a new website from Expert Africa is making it easier than ever to decide which country and even which lodges offer the best chances for wildlife sightings. The data, sourced from more than 700 traveler surveys compiled by the tour operator over two years, has morphed into a huge ‘citizen science’ project and represents nearly 30,000 observations of 26 animal species.”
CNET: How to improve your privacy in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge and Brave. “Privacy is now a priority among browser makers, but they may not go as far as you want in fighting pervasive ad industry trackers on the web. Here’s a look at how you can crank up your privacy settings to outsmart that online tracking.”
The Verge: How to move from Chrome to another browser. “Of course, anyone who has used a browser for any length of time will have built up a considerable library of bookmarks, preferences, and saved passwords. If you do move to a new browser, you won’t have to sacrifice your bookmarks; you can easily import them from Chrome into your new browser. Here’s how to do it.”
Wired: It’s Time To Switch To A Privacy Browser. “If you want to push back against online tracking, you’ve got several options to pick from when choosing a default browser. These are the browsers that put user privacy high on the list of their priorities.”
ZDNet: Mobile Chrome, Safari, and Firefox failed to show phishing warnings for more than a year. “For more than a year, mobile browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari failed to show any phishing warnings to users, according to a research paper published this week.”
CNET: How to make YouTube faster in non-Chrome browsers. “Chris Peterson, technical program manager at Mozilla , pointed out this discrepancy on Twitter earlier this week, claiming YouTube was loading up to five times slower in Firefox. The slow loading in other browsers is due to YouTube’s use of the Shadow DOM v0 API, he says, which is now deprecated and used only in Chrome, meaning YouTube is significantly slower in virtually all other browsers. Fortunately, there’s an easy workaround for non-Chrome users: Revert back to the old design. Of course, the option to opt out of the new design is long gone. But there are browser add-ons and extensions that will bring it back and speed up your YouTube experience.”
Bleeping Computer: Google Experiment Tests Top 5 Browsers, Finds Safari Riddled With Security Bugs. “The Project Zero team at Google has created a new tool for testing browser DOM engines and has unleashed it on today’s top five browsers, finding most bugs in Apple’s Safari. The tool — named Domato — is a fuzzer, a security testing toolkit that feeds a software application with random data and analyzes the output for abnormalities. Google engineer Ivan Fratric created Domato with the goal of fuzzing DOM engines, the browser components that read HTML code and organize it into the DOM (Document Object Model), which is then ‘painted’ and displayed inside the browser window that human users view on their screens.” Just keep in mind that the test was run by Google.
Bleeping Computer: Apple and Google Fix Browser Bug. Microsoft Does Not.. “Microsoft has declined to patch a security bug Cisco Talos researchers discovered in the Edge browser, claiming the reported issue is by design. Apple and Google patched a similar flaw in Safari (CVE-2017-2419) and Chrome (CVE-2017-5033), respectively. According to Cisco Talos researcher Nicolai Grødum, the vulnerability can be classified as a bypass of the Content Security Policy (CSP), a mechanism that allows website developers to configure HTTP headers and instruct the browsers of people visiting their site what resources (JavaScript, CSS) they can load and from where.”
And in another sign of impending doom for Flash – and as far as I’m concerned it can’t come fast enough – Safari will start blocking Flash and other content by default. “Starting with Safari 10 in macOS Sierra, Safari will begin blocking Flash across all websites even if you have the plug-in installed, requiring users to activate Flash on a page by page basis. Users can chose to activate only once (this is the default option) or every time. If you visit a website that has Flash and HTML5, Safari will automatically opt for the latter.”
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