I love Apple products and really love their branding but one thing I hate is to see the truth and completely over look it when just because you love it. Lately I have been coming across information detailing that Mac OS X is not secure it is just not attacked as much as Windows. I don’t know if you ever came across a competition called PWN2OWN. It is a competition is which people are competing against each other to hack computers with different operating systems and different browsers. The first browser to come to submission was safari on the mac.

The only browser that wasn’t cracked was Google Chrome on the windows operating system. This came at a surprise to me but after researching the Google Chrome sandboxing feature along with Windows randomization feature it is more secure than windows but it is attacked way more. For mac users I wouldn’t draw any concern over it now but when apple reaches a higher market share I think they will be in trouble.

Safari 4 Beta, is officially the fastest browser to this date. On benchmarks it has blown internet explorer (of course) and firefox out the water with it’s speed. Now that we are stepping deeper and deeper into the age of web applications,  JavaScript is becoming more and more essential. Apple has something called, The Nitro Engine. This Nitro Engine is especially for JavaScript which also beat Google Chrome V8 engine for the JavaScript. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”

i-Bench HTML (in seconds)
Mac and Windows
Safari 4 Beta  - 1.06 s
Chrome   1.0  - 1.38 s
Firefox 3.0 - 3.11 s
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 - 3.16 s
IE 7  - 3.25 s
IE 8 Beta - 4.71 s

i-Bench JavaScript (in seconds)
Mac and Windows
Safari 4 Beta – 0.14 s
Chrome 1.0 – 0.20 s
Firefox 3.0 – 0.76 s
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 – 1.04 s
IE 7 – 1.81 s
IE 8 Beta – 0.73 s

SunSpider JavaScript (in milliseconds)
Mac and Windows
Safari 4 Beta – 657.07 ms
Chrome 1.0 – 853.13 ms
Firefox 3.0 – 2399.20 ms
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 – 1034.47 ms
IE 7  – 19902.20 ms
IE 8 Beta  – 4137.80 ms

Now the next question is how secure it is? I mean Safari 4 can be fast but if it isn’t secure enough that means you can get robbed faster. Well this is what Apple has to say, “Safari also provides secure encryption technologies to prevent eavesdropping, forgery, and digital tampering while you browse the Internet. It offers standards-based authentication for logging into secure websites, and it supports the most popular proxy protocols.”

So we will see how that will draw out it is still in it’s beta version. I still believe Firefox 3 is the most secure browser, but Safari 4 has the title for the fastest browser for 2009.