Apple to add browser to Windows downloads

**jim777** · #1 06-12-2007, 01:40 PM

I know a few Windows users end up unhappy to have to download all 50MEG+ of iTunes just to get Apple's occasionally necessary Quicktime viewer (I'm certainly one), but as announced June 11th at the Apple Developer Conference by Steve Jobs, Apple's new "Safari 3" browser will soon be added to all QuickTime and iTunes downloads as well.
Apple is unhappy with IE's 78% market share, and Firefox's 15% share (Apple has about 4%) and wants to grow their own share to 20%.

Jobs from yesterday as reported by PC Week today (June 12th) :
"But how are we going to distribute this? I mean, we don't talk to these customers, do we? There are 500K downloads of Firefox a day—what are we going to do? Well, it turns out that there are over a million downloads on iTunes a day ... half a billion downloads to Windows machines. We know how to reach these customers, and we're going to do exactly that," he said.

So, pretty soon that Quicktime viewer is going to be even larger than the current 55 MEG it is now.
So..... is this all to make browsing better for Windows users? Nope! It's all to get the world's website owners to change their pages to be friendlier to Safari, which is of course ......the browser on the iPhone. So, all you Windows users with iPods (and folks like me who occasionally need to open a Quicktime file) will be taking one for the iPhone

I mean, what good is a website that can't be easily viewed on the iPhone's 1" by 2" screen? No good, evidently....

**jaxadam** · #2 06-12-2007, 01:55 PM

Quicktime Alternative.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/...lternative.htm

All the great features of Quicktime, without all of the bad.

**elcid** · #3 06-12-2007, 01:55 PM

Quicktime can bite my ass. I'd rather not view a file than run it, but that's just me.

Demiurge · #4 06-12-2007, 02:27 PM

Interesting, given the Apple commercials that poke fun at how with Windows machines, you get stuck with a bunch of crappy extra software you neither want nor need.

**jemsite** · #5 06-12-2007, 02:35 PM

talk about a waste of developer time.

it's amazing anyone uses anything but firefox... glen

**elcid** · #6 06-12-2007, 02:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demiurge

Interesting, given the Apple commercials that poke fun at how with Windows machines, you get stuck with a bunch of crappy extra software you neither want nor need.

You're forgetting that all Mac things are for the cool kids though. Their software is not crappy, and all Mac software is both wanted and needed.

**Ayrton** · #7 06-12-2007, 02:48 PM

I hate quicktime, and will not install it.

dex · #8 06-12-2007, 03:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elcid

Quicktime can bite my ass. I'd rather not view a file than run it, but that's just me.

Same here, Quicktime and Real blew their chances with me a few years back and I rather not have access to content than install either of them.

StoneLord · #9 06-13-2007, 01:11 AM

http://www.ephpod.com/

what it is: EphPod is a full-featured, easy-to-use Windows application that connects with Apple's iPod. With a FireWire card and EphPod on a PC, it takes under 30 minutes to transfer 1,000 songs to an iPod. In addition, EphPod supports standard WinAmp (.M3U) playlists, includes powerful playlist creation features, and will synchronize an entire music collection with one click. It imports Microsoft Outlook contacts, in addition to allowing users to create and edit their own contacts. EphPod can also download the latest news, weather, e-books, and movie listings to an iPod.
---------------
repeating jaxadams contribution:
Quicktime Alternative.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/...lternative.htm
--------------------

http://codecguide.com/about_real.htm

About Real Alternative
Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer.

All RealMedia formats (.ra .rm .rmvb .ram .rpm .rv .rp .rt .rnx .smi .smil etc.) are supported, including streaming content and RealMedia content that is embedded in webpages.
-----------

There, no need for quicktime, itunes or the piece of crap realplayer.

Go get 'em

Nordhauser · #10 06-13-2007, 01:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jemsite

talk about a waste of developer time.

it's amazing anyone uses anything but firefox... glen

seriously/

**jemsite** · #11 06-14-2007, 12:22 AM

the hits keep a comin'

http://www.betanews.com/article/Day_...are/1181661606

Quote:

'Day One' for Safari for Windows Becomes Zero-Day Nightmare
By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews
June 12, 2007, 11:20 AM

It took security engineers perhaps less than two hours yesterday to introduce Apple's surprise entry in the field of Windows browsers to the big, cruel world of exploits and vulnerabilities, following its introduction yesterday morning at WWDC. As a result, much of the clout Safari had received as the secure browsing alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox -- as long as it was on a Macintosh -- was burned off like fire to a flash fuse.

Errata Security engineer David Maynor had a report posted on the first vulnerability he found by 1:48 pm, complete with screenshots of the pre-crash letdown dialog produced by his fuzzing tool. As he admitted, it wasn't a difficult crash to find, posting a screen shot of the memory dump revealing both a stack corruption and an access violation, and then giving credit to Thor Larholm for posting a complete report on the calamity not an hour later.

"I downloaded and installed Safari for Windows 2 hours ago, when I started writing this," Larholm wrote, "and I now have a fully functional command execution vulnerability, triggered without user interaction simply by visiting a web site."

Both Larholm and Maynor have made it clear their intentions are simply to discover vulnerabilities and warn the vendor and the public as to their implications, not to profit from their exploitation...because, quite frankly, the exploits don't appear to be that difficult.

Apple's Web site touts, "Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one." As Larholm explained on his blog, that may very well be correct: Its engineers obviously designed Safari to take advantage of security protocols in the OS X operating system, as evidenced by function calls to those protocols Larholm located inside the source code for the Windows version - calls which would obviously go unfulfilled.

"On the OS X platform," he continued, "Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on the Windows platform, namely intimate operating system knowledge." As a result, Safari for Windows may be expecting other layers of the operating system to provide security - layers which aren't present on Windows, especially since Microsoft has naturally adapted its transport layer security for optimum use with IE7.

As an example -- one which may be as important for Firefox as for Safari -- Larholm demonstrated the use of an inline frame <IFRAME> element with embedded JavaScript code. When delivered to Safari, it passes on an unfiltered request to the old Gopher protocol, which on his system is handled by Firefox. That browser then processes the unfiltered request raw, with the result being that CMD.EXE is called, pulling up the command line.

If Larholm wished to go further with this demonstration, he could have passed a default command to CMD.EXE - which, of course, would also have been unfiltered.

Safari is built on top of an open-source Web browser engine called WebKit, whose developers announced on their blog this morning that the first nightly build of the Windows version of WebKit will be released sometime today. At that time, perhaps veteran Windows developers may become available to flesh out and plug the holes which Safari's disconnection from Mac OS X left open.

microdmitry · #12 06-14-2007, 04:56 AM

You guys are missing the big picture here. The sole purpose of releasing Safari on Windows is to give web developers who don't have Macs a development verification tool for iPhone webapps. They didn't spin it that way, maybe hoping that, who knows, if they bundle it with iTunes people might just start using it, but I think that was the underlying reason. How else can you explain that they ship the actual fonts and their own font rendering system, controls, everything with it. The goal is to make the pages look exactly the same as they would on iPhone.

And hacking early betas is lame. It smells of sensationalism. :-)

**jim777** · #13 06-14-2007, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by microdmitry

You guys are missing the big picture here. The sole purpose of releasing Safari on Windows is to give web developers who don't have Macs a development verification tool for iPhone webapps. They didn't spin it that way, maybe hoping that, who knows, if they bundle it with iTunes people might just start using it, but I think that was the underlying reason. How else can you explain that they ship the actual fonts and their own font rendering system, controls, everything with it. The goal is to make the pages look exactly the same as they would on iPhone.

And hacking early betas is lame. It smells of sensationalism. :-)

Sorry, but NOBODY missed the big picture here. In the very first post of the thread I noted that Apple was doing this to the Windows world specifically to benefit the users of its iPhone product. They are spreading the love by wielding the hammer. I have to wonder what Guy Kawasaki would think of this move.

**jemsite** · #14 06-14-2007, 12:04 PM

big picture is developers won't support a marginal device whose base installed OS is 4%. so they dangle a carrot to those dummies thinking safari on windows & iPhone will be a money maker for them. ROTFLMAO.

safari has no purpose on windows. iPhone itself has a small niche for yuppies and spoiled teens that mostly browse the web on cell phones but has almost no purpose when compared to a blackberry/Q/treo, double that since it's locked to ATT.

the hacking the betas shows how inept at software developent that Safari crew really is... glen

**elcid** · #15 06-14-2007, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jemsite

safari has no purpose on windows. iPhone itself has a small niche for yuppies and spoiled teens that mostly browse the web on cell phones but has almost no purpose

Dont forget to be cool. Havent you seen the Mac commercials. Cool people use apple products. I mean, who would you rather be, the dorky guy with a job on the Daily Show, or the cool guy who only does Mac commercials.