With a few less security exploits and usability bugs, the Safari got a bit tamer. Not bulletproof, I’m sure, but it’s impressive - 3 days after the original release and the justified shit-storm that followed, 3.0.1 got out. Thor Larholm mentions his finding is no longer exploitable on this version [but still very much so on the latest stable Mac OS X incarnation of Safari¹]. No word from David Maynor yet, I’m curious what the status is with his set of findings.

Apple did a great job, though. They had to save themselves somehow from the entire bad PR they’ve received [just look at how many trackbacks Maynor and Larholm got, and they're not the only ones to find exploitable code.] Now they’ll be getting positive thoughts from everyone² because of their fast turn-around rate.

They could have brushed it off, saying that it’s beta and bugs like these are to be expected. But they’ve decided to follow a less conventional approach - in “high-brow”, commercial circles like Redmond and Cupertino - and release often. This is what has made open source what it is - numerous updates, sometimes even with just a few fixes - keep everything safe and sound. No specific days, no slow version incrementing - here and now. Users go with it because they don’t have to pay for it, they don’t lose any information between minor [security] updates and they know they’re being kept safe. Sure, some like to spin this off as an indication of poor quality, but what would you rather have, 3 updates in a week or one information theft case in a month?

There is one thing to say though - Safari has been reported to crash a lot on Windows. I can’t test it anywhere so I’m taking a mental weighted average of reports I’ve read. Safari comes to Windows to expose developers to its engine and permit them to start pounding away at iPhone apps and what have you. I would have waited a few days after the WWDC keynote³ to release a more improved version of Safari. First impressions go a long way - and Safari doesn’t seem to have swept anybody off their feet.

1. Safari 2 received no updates in the last 24 hours [↩]
2. The whole story may be a huge and lucrative PR stunt, engineered like so by Apple - though a very ugly and disrespectful one for potential users and application developers everywhere [↩]
3. Apple doesn’t often announce things way ahead of time, but Leopard and the iPhone were exceptions, so maybe there’s a new trend showing up [↩]