JaegerMonkey, in its current form, although unfinished, is still behind the Webkit browsers belonging to Safari and Chrome, when it comes to performance. The code of the engine has been written from scratch. The company claims to generate good machine code, but there are still a few weaknesses to be considered and worked out, among them function calls, which prove to be about ten times slower than what the competition has.

JavaScript is already an important part of tests for web speed. Many applications and complex sites use this scripting language. Safari has been one of the first to use JavaScript as an important feature. Chrome has had a quick growth in market share thanks to rapid improvements in its speed. The gap has been closed recently with the release of Safari 5. Both browsers have consistently surpassed Firefox during the recent months.

The difference seems to be impressive, mostly due to the fact that Google’s browser has only been active for two years, whereas Apple has been offering Safari since 2003. Even if StatCounter hasn’t explained this shift, it is assumed that among the factors were Chrome’s speed and multi-platform support.

Apple has mainly optimized Safari for Macs; this has been rather secure in the USA through the company’s computer market share in this region. Lately, Apple has been making efforts to improve several features for Windows and has also added hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s operating system.

The update is currently limited to the iPad and US English, checking for the Safari browser of the device and also for the Google account preferences just before the sign-in. More languages are to become available soon. Moreover, the HTML5-based framework is expected to support even more tablets in the near future.

When coming to operating systems, Windows 7 gained a large market share, but not enough to change Microsoft’s overall usage share. Windows 7 went from 7.57 percent to 8.92 percent of the total market, but Windows as a whole has only slightly moved to 92.12 percent. Most of the gain came directly from users moving from Windows XP to Vista.

Snow Leopard upgrades were not sufficient to stop the drop in Leopard users and therefore Apple continued its soft decline to 5.02 percent. However, iPhone share has for the first time exceeded the 0.5 percent. The lack of activity shown by Linux resulted in a drop to 0.98 percent.

No explanation is offered by most of the studies for the changes in browser or operating system share, however. While Chrome was likely to be helped by a new beta version for Mac corroborated with the relative age of Mozilla Firefox, it is very clear that operating systems use in influenced by popularity as well as users’ regular habits. As resulted from these studies, Windows was more used in months with more work days, while holiday periods as well as vacation-heavy ones were clearly favouring personal Macs.

A great part of the attacks affecting the Apple’s Safari is due to the mobile Safari browser on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

SQL injections were the most common with 25 percent, followed by cross-site scripting with 17 percent, phishing at 14 percent and rogue web servers at 12 percent.

Open-source fans always claimed that Firefox should be more secure because many application authors have real difficulties in finding and solving bugs, while others are unaware of applications. Internet Explorer received criticism in the past for Active X-like tools that were often offering websites direct access to PCs. Since then, much vulnerability was solved through the browser or through patches in Windows.

Out of the total reported vulnerabilities, 78 percent affected web technologies, such as web servers, web browsers, applications, ActiveX and plug-ins, which reflects a significant increase from the beginning of this year.

Based on the vulnerabilities Cenzic found using its ClickToSecure managed service, leaks of information, XSS, authentication/authorization and session management flaws continue to be in the top. The majority of assessments Cenzic completed highlighted the continuing exposure and risk faced by organizations.