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Apple brought it’s second Apple program to Windows today. The first was iTunes. Now, we have the Safari web browser for Windows. The initial release is in beta of course.

Some good things about the Safari for Windows is that Apple has promised a speedy, speedy version. Apple says that Safari performed an iBench HTML performance suite test twice as fast as IE 7, and also pretty comparable results from the Javascript test.

Visit Apple and download Safari for Windows.

Google is rolling out Google Gears to confront a big speed bump faced by all web based applications – the ability to work without an internet connection.

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Don’t get overly excited now. Google Gears will not just automagically make your web app work offline. To take advantage of the offline features that Google Gears provides, you will have to add or change code in your web app.

There are three core modules provided by Gears:

1. LocalServer for storing and accessing application pages offline.
2. Database for storing and accessing application data on the user’s computer.
3. WorkerPool that helps in performing long-running tasks like code that will synchronize data between your server and the user’s computer.

Be sure to check out the:

• Gears Tutorial to learn the basic concepts.
• Sample Apps where you can also download the source code for the samples in a zip file from the same page.

Thanks to ZDNet for this post on exploit code that’s been made publically available for a serious security flaw in Photoshop. This flaw could allow attackers to take complete control of your Windows machine, according to an advisory from FrSIRT.

The flaw, rated critical, is caused by buffer overflow errors when handling a malformed “BMP”, “DIB” or “RLE” file.

“This could be exploited by attackers to take complete control of an affected system by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted file using a vulnerable application,” FrSIRT said.

…

The exploit code, available at Milw0rm.com, has been successfully tested against Windows XP Service Pack 2.

As of now, there are no patches available for these vulnerabilities. Of course always apply the common sense approach, “Don’t open files from sources you don’t trust”.