Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.4.11 with Safari 3

Safari 3 has been released for Tiger, along with a host of security updates and bug fixes, as part of the Mac OS X 10.4.11 update. The updates are mammoth: update for PowerPC (67.9 MB), combo update for PowerPC (180.8 MB), update for Intel (128 MB), and combo update for Intel (321.5 MB). That last update would take 18 hours to download over a dial-up modem or 3 minutes via a home fiber link. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther
also received a revised security update – 2007-008 – for its terminal 10.3.9 release (client, 49 MB; server, 63.4 MB).

The list of security updates and bug fixes is long. Many of the security updates are rather important, fixing six kernel-level bugs. Malicious Flash content could allow a machine to be taken over, and Apple has updated Tiger to use version 9.0.47.0 of Flash Player, which is also available separately. It’s worth noting that a few of the WebCore fixes are credited to a Google employee, reflecting Google’s use of the WebKit (which underlies Safari) for the Android mobile-phone platform (see “Google’s View of Our Cell Phone Future Is an Android, Not a GPhone,”
2007-11-12).

On the non-security side, the list is more modest except for the inclusion of Safari 3 for Tiger. Many of the issues are relatively minor, although important to those that they affect. Our Kiwi friends might be happy to see that Apple, months too late, has finally provided the correct updates for Daylight Saving Time for their nation (see “Daylight Saving Time Rules Fixed for New Zealand,” 2007-09-20.)

Apple also updated the Safari 3 beta for Windows XP and Vista to fix a number of security problems found in both the Mac OS X and Windows versions, as well as to add a vast amount of feature refinement. The list of new and improved items is rather extensive, including basic functionality like printing page numbers and more important features such as listing FTP directories and managing cookies.