Safari 5.1 Protects Users with New Sandbox

[jamescv7]

The newly launched Safari 5.1 features sandboxing technology which promises to protect Mac OS X Lion users from web-based exploits that might try to infect them with malware.

In computer programming, sandboxing refers to the practice of isolating a process by placing in into a restricted environment. A sandboxed process usually communicates with the system through a broker.

For developers it's much easier to make sure that a small brokering process is vulnerability-free than the hundreds of thousands of lines of code found in a browser's layout engine.

Safari becomes the second browser after Chrome to feature sandboxing, although unlike Chrome, Safari 5.1 is only sandboxed on the new Mac OS X Lion.

That's because Safari's sandbox relies on the sandboxing technology built into Apple's new operating system. Mac OS X has had a kernel-level sandbox for its core processes since Leopard, but this has been greatly enhanced and extended in Lion.

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[Jack]

Browser sandboxing technology will become a standard in the near future.Can't figure why the Safari team didn't manage to embed a sandbox for their browser in the Windows OS also.....I mean, if Google did it... what stopped them ?

 

[Tobi]

Browser sandboxing technology will become a standard in the near future.Can't figure why the Safari team didn't manage to embed a sandbox for their browser in the Windows OS also.....I mean, if Google did it... what stopped them ?

I think its a marketing strategy, while enhancing the security of their OS. Microsoft has done the same thing with 7, sort of. Security Essential's NIS feature only works in Vista & 7. Same goes for IE9.

 

[Jack]

Browser sandboxing technology will become a standard in the near future.Can't figure why the Safari team didn't manage to embed a sandbox for their browser in the Windows OS also.....I mean, if Google did it... what stopped them ?

I think its a marketing strategy, while enhancing the security of their OS. Microsoft has done the same thing with 7, sort of. Security Essential's NIS feature only works in Vista & 7. Same goes for IE9.

Have to agree with you , but this is one of the reasons why Safari will never be widely used on Windows.

 

[Fluxon]

Yeah, but if Safari is still slow and stuff, why use it?

 

[Hungry Man]

Same reason people use IE9. It's built in.

Apple's Webkit 2.0 is what allows for this sandboxing. It's great and I love that they're still improving on Webkit.

I'm not sure if Chrome will move to Webkit 2.0... I suppose they will eventually. But they already have sandboxing on Webkit 1.0, moving to 2.0 would solve a few of the problems with high memory usage though apparently.