The Mactard iBlog

Apple’s shiny new version 4 of its Safari browser is causing headaches among many users - including here at The Reg.

Ever since we upgraded to version 4 from the remarkably stable beta version, Safari has crashed repeatedly - and we’re not alone. Over on deep-Mac-geek website MacInTouch, numerous - but by no means all - posters are reporting crashes after upgrading from the beta to the shipping version.

Apple’s Safari forum is also replete with complaints - including threads with such happy titles as Safari 4 crashing every 10 minutes, Safari 4 Keeps on crashing, and Great Safari update…. NOT!, which includes the following quote from one poster: “OK I’ve had it with this new safari, it’s complete pants!”

Fixes suggested by various posters include resolving conflicts with either an InputManager or a Login Item, removing utilities that use the Accessibility APIs (such as LazyMouse), cleaning out accumulated Top Sites page previews in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari /Webpage Previews/, deleting the Menu Extra Enabler.bundle, and more.

Here at The Reg, we’ve yet to solve our problem - and we’re getting tired of hearing our Windows-using collegues ridiculing us by saying: “Hey, I thought a Mac ‘just works!’”. ®

From The Register

A teenage girl was electrocuted after dropping her laptop into the bath as she twittered in the tub.

Police said they believed Maria Barbu, 17, had tried to plug in her laptop with wet hands after the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak at her home in Brasov, central Romania.

She was found dead by her parents with the laptop lying next to her.

(src)

A new survey has shown that the average iPhone user spends just 12% of their time on the device actually making calls and using the Internet.

The other 88% of their time is spent being inexplicably smug to friends and acquaintances whilst demonstrating what the iPhone can do.

“I feel like I own one already the amount of times I’ve had one demonstrated to me,” said one friend of an iPhone user.

“It’s shiny, it’s new, it’s cool, you couldn’t live without it. I get it.”

We asked one iPhone user how often he uses the device to actually make calls and surf the Internet.

He said, “Hang on, look at this first. I can listen to a track, click here, find out if they’re in concert close by, get directions and then book tickets. I won’t, because I hate Girls Aloud, but you know, I could. If I wanted to. Isn’t that amazing?”

Applications shmapplications

The iPhone application market has served to dramatically increase the level of smugness among iPhone users with the advent of several graphically interesting, yet entirely pointless applications.

We spoke to one iPhone application customer, who said “Check this out. It’s like a pint of lager, right, with bubbles and everything. But if I tip it up, it drains away as if I was drinking it! Isn’t that cool?”

Apple’s iPhone business model is reliant on shared call revenues from the UK’s exclusive mobile carrier O2.

As such, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying, “I wish people would just get on and use it to make some fucking calls already.”

http://newsarse.com/2009/03/iphone-users-too-busy-demonstrating-features-to-make-calls/

A well-known security consultant says Apple is struggling to effectively protect its users against malware and other online threats and suggests executives improve by adopting a secure development lifecycle to design its growing roster of products.

…

“It’s clear that that Apple considers security important, but that the company also struggles to execute effectively when faced with security challenges,” he writes in a recent article on Mac news website Tidbits. He goes on to fault the company for its ongoing failure to patch a gaping security hole in Mac versions of Java.

The suggestions came as Apple on Monday announced Safari 4.0, a release that fixes more than 50 vulnerabilities in the browser. Protection against clickjacking attacks, denial-of-service flaws and bugs that allow for remote code execution were among the fare.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/apple_security_suggestions/