Apple on Friday added anti-phishing protection to Safari, the last major browser to receive the feature that blocks known identity-stealing sites. The company also patched 11 security bugs in the program, the bulk of them specific to the Microsoft Windows version.

Released on Thursday, Safari 3.2 includes a new feature, dubbed “Fraudulent sites” in the browser’s options listing. However, Apple did not update either Safari’s help file or its online documentation with any additional information about the tool, including how it works, what database it uses to “blacklist” sites and whether it relays URLs back to Apple for checking or relies on a locally-stored database.

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Google has finally made the Safari-friendly version of Gears available. Savvy Mac users could have downloaded and installed a rougher version of it as early as three weeks ago, however only Monday did the company announce a new version that’s been readied for mass consumption.

Like its predecessor, the Mac version of Gears requires version 3.1.1 or higher of Safari, or version 1.5 or higher of Firefox, along with a machine running the most recent build of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5.3 (Leopard). It offers the same offline-goodness as its Windows counterpart, which is to say you’ll get limited offline file access and optimization on the handful of Web applications that support it.

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Apple again used a Friday to provide its developer community with new pre-release software for testing during the weekend, including new builds of Mac OS X 10.5.5 client, Mac OS X 10.5.5 server, and Safari 4.0.

People familiar with the beta releases say a fourth external build of the company’s Mac OS X 10.5.5 update landed as build 9F23, which addressed three minor issues, one of which pertained to Mail.app and home directory search.

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The Mac accounts for 7.94 percent of computers on the Internet, and Safari is the browser of choice for 6.31 percent of the same audience, so says marketshare.hitslink.com.

This increases Mac users’ worldwide presence by nearly two percent from a year ago. In June 2007, 6.4 percent of the internet used a Mac, and 4.85 percent used Safari.

Charles Jade of Ars Technica also notes that two thirds of Macs in use now feature Intel processors. The vast majority of the Safari users are Mac users, with only 4.3 percent of Safari users running it under Windows. That’s a ten-fold increase, though, in Safari for Windows users since it was introduced at 2007’s WWDC.

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Apple caused quite a controversy over the weekend when the company made good on its promise to use iTunes as a way of pushing the Safari web browser on unsuspecting Windows users. The controversy arises from Apple’s decision to bundle the Safari web browser as a “update” for iTunes on Windows — despite the fact that Safari is a totally new, and potentially unwanted, application.

Software Update, Apple’s means of distributing iTunes updates on Windows, has previously only offered to update existing software. However, late last week that practice changed, and Apple began listing Safari for Windows as a “update,” which clearly, it is not.

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CUPERTINO, California—March 18, 2008—Apple® today introduced Safari™ 3.1, the world’s fastest web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers, and is the first browser to support the latest innovative web standards needed to deliver the next generation of highly interactive Web 2.0 experiences*. Safari 3.1 is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari for both Mac OS® X and Windows.

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Ah, Apple. One of these days you’ll get around to launching the iPhone globally. Until then, people are importing and exporting them all over the place, leaving you with profits and a hacker problem that I’m personally very glad you’re having.

It’s a “problem” I’m sure you’ll continue to enjoy even after iPhone 2.0 software / firmware comes out and the SDK helps developers create all kinds of authorised applications.

I can only imagine that many of us will be enjoying two wireless iPhone stores – the official App Store and the unofficial Installer.app - once the hackers figure out how to get around whatever new protections iPhone 2.0 firmware introduces, something that surely is inevitable.

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