Safari

I'm not a fan of PayPal, with its poor customer service (which is a huge deal when it comes to handling money), but I'm with them on this:

Web payment firm Paypal has said it will block "unsafe browsers" from using its service as part of wider anti-phishing efforts....

...Paypal said it was "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers such as Internet Explorer 4"....

...Paypal said some users were still using Internet Explorer 3 , released more than 10 years ago.

IE3?? Holy cow! I don't even think that's loaded on my old IBM Intellistation that's collecting dust in the corner.

Here's a surprise to me:

Paypal said it supported the use of Extended Validation SSL Certificates....

...The latest version of Internet Explorer support EV SSL certificates, while Firefox 2 supports it with an add-on but Apple's Safari browser for Mac and PCs does not.

(Emphasis added.)

Via MacWorld:

“This is not good; this is a security risk,” he said. “We’re a bank.”

Wilson said it has taken him the better part of a week to remove Safari from his network and prevent it from being reinstalled.

In an e-mail interview, Susan Bradley agreed that the updates are creating a problem for administrators and making users less secure. “It impacts all of us when more potential attack surface is installed in a group of folks that are vulnerable enough as it is,” said Bradley, who is chief technology officer with Tamiyasu, Smith, Horn and Braun, Accountancy Corp.

Of course I don't have any stats, but I wonder how many of these IT folks are the same ones keeping IE6 alive.

Last week, after suffering through the appalling un-usability of the Blackberry 8830 "worldphone" throughout DrupalCon -- which followed more than a year suffering from my worst technology purchase ever -- I bit the bullet and swallowed my distaste of Apple's increasingly closed-and-controlling technology, and my lingering resentment of AT&T Wireless (ugh) by going into the Apple store and buying an iPhone.

Yeah, I know. I'm sooooooo late to the party.

I was drawn by the user interface, not the newly "opened" application development path that has gotten all the press. The user interface was enough.

And wow, did my interest ever pay off!

This "phone" has the highest screen resolution I have seen, not just in terms of pixel resolution but also what they do with it. They aren't afraid of going small. This means that the iPhone is the first "smartphone" with a real web browser -- no wonder the iPhone Safari ignores handheld stylesheets. And it's not just the browser that enjoys this detail -- its all the appls. This means that reading emails is not a matter of having to suffer through some clunky awkward font, such as what Blackberry offers.

The iPhone just makes it easier to read stuff.

The fact that there are no real applications available to add to the iPhone is somewhat of an annoyance, although the default apps aren't bad. To be sure, there are some "webapps" available, but in generally they pretty much suck -- all running through the browser with minimal usability.

And the iPhone "keyboard" simply sucks. The buttons are too small, and the "smart" spelling tends to override what you're trying to type.

Don't even think about using txting abbreviations. The iPhone will "correct" those "typos" into totally irrelevant words.

Why the iPhone keyboard won't display horizontally across the landscape orientation of the screen is beyond me. We surely could use the extra space between the buttons.

The unboxing

I took some photos of the unboxing of the iPhone. When I saw that Matthew, who bought an iPhone only because I did (heh), posted his iPhone unboxing, I thought I'd get off of my duff and download the unboxing images and post this blog post.

As usual, Apple gets so much right. Once you remove the flimsy shrink-wrap -- no bullet-proof plastic container -- you're left with just a box without any additional steel-strength tape tabs.

Lift the lid and you see your iPhone (wrapped in an easy-to-remove cellophane).

Funny that this device, which costs 20-30 times more than a DVD, is so much easier to unbox. It's so nice to be treated as a valued customer instead of a guilty-by-default thief.

Remove the iPhone and you are left with a plastic tray with an easy-grip tab. (Boo to Apple for using cycle 7 plastic! How much more would it have been to use easy-to-recycle cycle 1 or cycle 2 plastic? It would have been nice to have a totally recyclable package.)

Each item is easy to unbox. No tools required. Easy. Usable. Inviting.

Are there any product lawyers reading this?

As a citizen and computer user, I agree that Apple is wrong to push Safari on Windows users:

Debate is raging today over the news that Steve Jobs has made good on his summertime promise and is now sending Apple's browser Safari along for the ride when Windows users are prompted to update iTunes or Quicktime.

Users can deselect the additional software download, but let's be realistic - there's got to be millions of people unwittingly downloading Safari onto their computers right now. Downloading software has to be opt-in, not opt-out.

As a web developer, however, I am quietly thrilled that there's a real possibility that a significant number of people will stop using the crapware Internet Explorer -- especially IE6, which cannot die a soon enough death, in my book. Microsoft's browser has been a huge sap on productivity in web development, thanks to its continued refusal to adopt CSS standards.

So "boo" to Apple, but a bigger and pre-existing "BOO" to Microsoft. Here I prefer the lesser of two boos.