“Apple has just updated its Safari browser,” Paul Ducklin reports for Spohos. “This is the sixth Safari update in 10 months.”
“It’s good to see a published fix that: Comes reasonably soon (44 days) after the previous one; is focused on security; includes a majority of fixes found by Apple’s own researchers; appears to be fixing recently-found vulnerabilities,” Ducklin reports. “There’s not much detail in Apple’s security bulletin, which is, happily, already listed on the company’s HT1222 security portal page, except to note that the update fixes various Remote Code Execution (RCE) holes. That’s the usual sort of vendor long-hand for drive-by download or click-to-own.”
“Safari on Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks (OS X 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9 respectively) get patches, taking Safari 6 users to version 6.1.6 and Safari 7 users to 7.0.6,” Ducklin reports. “No surprise that Apple’s own ‘XP headache,’ Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), gets nothing.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: If you haven’t already done so and have the appropriate OS X version, update Safari now via Software Update.
Ducklin reports. “No surprise that Apple’s own ‘XP headache,’ Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), gets nothing.”
Hey, Duck… is the error present in Snow Leopard or have you asked Apple if a fix is in the future if it is affected [ XP Headache? Really – eyes rolling]
I’m sad to say I’ve interacted with Paul Ducklin. He reminds me of the support staff at Google. As you can see, he likes to exaggerate, among other displays of pretention. 🙄
I was pleasantly surprised this update did not require a restart. I remember I used to have to restart for every Safari update – when did that change?
Is a restart that difficult, or does it take too much time?
It creates too much hassle. When you have six active applications with a dozen different windows open, having to save everything, shut down, restart, reopen all the applications, reopen all the files and get them back to the same presentation state where they were before would take a good chunk of an hour. I never shut down my Macs because I can leave everything open the way I have it, and continue working the next day without wasting time.
In recent versions of OS X much of that hassle you mentioned is no longer necessary. If you quit an application with open files, those files will be remembered and opened next time the application is launched. And if you restart the computer, all the apps that were previously running will be automatically relaunched, and open windows in them, as well.
The only caution before quitting or restarting might be to save documents in apps that don’t have auto-save, and that have had edit changes made (in most apps, press Command-S).
I do a lot of work in DEVONthink, with 5 or 6 open databases and several open windows. There used to be a preferences setting to reopen the open databases and windows after quit. That’s not necessary nowadays. Even the scrolling positions of documents that I was reading will be remembered.
Safari will remember all the tabs that were open prior to quit, restart or shutdown. On startup of the Mac, all those tabs will automatically reload.
On Macs with a SSD boot drive, restart is very quick. So much so, that I now find it painful to work on an older iMac that has an HD boot drive.
Speaking of restarts, I do a lot of software support. Often, when a user reports flaky behavior, I suggest a restart. Surprisingly often, that’s the fix. A gremlin had taken up residence in memory, and was exorcised. Macs are not completely fault-tolerant. If the were, many of us couldn’t afford them. I’ve come to recommend a restart every few weeks, as a preventive maintenance action to help keep the Mac running at its best.
Unless you work 24 hours a day with no sleep seven days a week, an hour (dubious) to restart everything months apart, is NO big deal to make sure everything syncs.
Apple is now using two copies of WebKit in OS X. The one used by Safari is here:
/System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Webkit.
The one used by the overall System is here:
/System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Webkit
When the System version is changed, then we have to restart.
“No surprise that Apple’s own ‘XP headache,’ Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), gets nothing.”
This sentence implies that the SL is a problem for Apple of the magnitude that the 12-year old XP is for MS. While XP still runs on one in four Windows PCs, 10.6 SL runs on much fewer Macs; not to mention that SL is a significantly newer and more modern OS than XP.
Yeah. That’s just Ducklin showing off his grandiloquence. Nothing new, unfortunately.
“Apple’s own XP headache…” American men are becoming very “bitchy”, have you noticed?
Safari is an application, not an OS. Users with Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier OS versions will need to ditch Safari and run Chrome, Firefox or another browser which doesn’t have the deep hooks into Mac OS that Safari does.
Microsoft’s XP headache arose because customers chose not to upgrade to later versions of Windows – perhaps because of cost, or perhaps because of performance, or perhaps because of functionality.
Apple users on old versions of the OS are generally unable to upgrade because their hardware is too old.
My 9yr old Mac mini won’t run anything past Snow Leopard. But is it reasonable to demand that Apple keep supporting it? Of course I run Mavericks on my newer macs. Microsoft’s XP problem is really a Vista/Windows 7 problem with users choosing not to pay MS for crappy upgrades.
i think you forget rosetta much?
think Quicken……
and…..
OUCH! I’ve never considered Americanness as defining men as ‘bitchy.’ I personally am ‘snarky’, I’ll give you that. Applying your description to Paul Ducklin, however, I cannot disagree. (<–That's me being subtly 'bitchy'. Oops!)