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Safari 4's Messy Trail
Signum Ignitum writes "Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that's a privacy nightmare. Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you've visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn't know was kept about you." Some of Safari's bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.
The big value-proposition of the Mac has been that it is easy for the non-geeky user to use. Unfortunately, things like these make those very users vulnerable. Without exposing easy ways to flush potentially sensitive and private information, it is the same users Apple attempts to serve that will be exposed. And, this will probably be the default browser for most new systems, so unless this is patched, expect the problem to proliferate...
Keep in mind this is a beta, folks; if you're using it, you're presumably volunteering to help inform Apple about stuff like this. So in addition to letting everyone else know safari is doing this, it might be a good idea to let Apple know that it is unacceptable in a web browser. Presumably the company released the beta in order to solicit just this kind of information from its users; hopefully enough concern from users will lead them to take these "features" out of the final release candidate.
Use "Private Browsing" mode and this junk won't get in your history in the first place for you to need to delete it. The end. Meanwhile, fulltext searching of your history is hella convenient.
Here's why I use and love Safari 4 on OS X. And yes, I am a huge geek who hacks code for a living.
For me, Safari provides the best web experience. For you, Firefox 3 is the sweet spot. Why can't you just accept that people have differing priorities and requirements, instead of smugly deriding others for using a "miserable little browser"? If you want to hate on a browser, hate on IE. At least there's demonstrable evidence of how IE has damaged the web. Us Safari users are doing just fine.
Why is it that everyone's response to any sort of problem is "Windows is worse"? If someone described a serious flaw in say, a Prius, would your response be, "Yeah, but Honda sucks."
I'm not trying to excuse crappy design problems in Windows, but when is Apple going to lose this untouchable luster and take it's lumps along with everyone else?
You're not seriously considering Chrome over Safari for privacy reasons?
Jeeze, seriously, I didn't even RTFA but I noticed TFS said Safari 4 was generating potentially gigabytes of cached info, which it did -not- delete when you "cleaned" the cache.
Yeah, slashdot summaries are known for being highly accurate and reliable, and not at all sensationalistic. Of course, anything could potentially generate gigabytes of data. My text editor could do it if I had enough monkeys. But is the average Safari user's cache weighing in at several gigabytes? I don't think so. That was just put there to cause alarm for attention-getting reasons.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not any more. If you're a good boy, you get to disable ads on /. while you're logged in. I now just get a little box saying "Ads disabled [tick] Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!".
Dear Slashdot policy makers,
The feature introduced to allow active participants the option of disabling advertisements on the site has to be one of the most awesome things I've seen implemented re: ads on community driven sites.
Keep the great ideas coming.