Bill Gates’ Microsoft, long hated by the technorati for its aggressive pushing of inferior technologies, its arrogant attitude toward the standards used by the rest of the industry, the secrecy that it cloaks its own proprietary ways of doing things in (so that no one can interoperate with its products), and its paranoid and monopolistic way of murdering anything that it deems as potential competition, has an apprentice now: Steve Jobs’ Apple.
Ever since the iPod took the MP3-player world by storm, I’ve noticed that Apple has borrowed more and more heavily from Microsoft’s playbook. With that in mind, its latest move, pushing its Safari browser on anyone using iTunes or QuickTime, seems perfectly in character.
Until recently, Apple was seen by many as the computer world’s savior from Microsoft… but maybe we need to be saved from Apple too. Thank goodness that Linux is finally maturing into a decent desktop OS.
They’ve been pushing iTunes on people who use Quicktime much longer than that, every time there’s a new version it’ll try to slip it in, either that or you remove the Apple updater and worry about Quicktime malware exploiting the Quicktime exploit-of-the-week. It’s really an extension of what they already have been doing. The thing is, they actually improved Safari significantly, though I still prefer Firefox, it’s now to the point where I could see someone using it. I have no idea why they want to alienate people this way – apparently Apple figures emulating Windows malware practices is a good business model.
Yes, I noticed that a long time ago too. Fortunately my wife always asks me whether she really wants to install whatever her computer is prompting her to… that saved her from a drive-by download just a couple days ago (one that wasn’t from Apple 😉 ).
Hahahaha! In my case, I’ve embraced the dark side! Of course, Macs don’t get drive-by downloads; and Safari on the Mac is not pushed that way AFAIK. 🙂
I’d still recommend Firefox and NoScript, but I suspect you already plan for that.
Yep, and NoScript, and most plug-ins, work in Firefox for OS X too. There’s also an native-widget browser from Mozilla called Camino, but I don’t know if it has a NoScript style plug-in.
What I meant about Safari is that it isn’t malware-style-delivered in the way the blog entry mentioned it is now for Windows, though it is included with the OS. (Able to be removed unlike IE in Windows.) You are right, if you’re concerned about exploits, its best not to use it – the recent ownage at the hackathon was done via an unpatched Safari bug. (The Vista machine was cracked with a flash plug-in bug. Another reason to use NoScript.)