PayPal is considering banning Safari and older versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox from accessing the site due to concerns about phishing.

Two requirements for PayPal to access the site are the ability to block known or suspected phishing sites and support for Extended Validation (EV) certificates that provides greater protection than Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certs. Safari currently provides neither of these features, while the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer do.

Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, said, “Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do to protect their customers. Safari has got nothing in terms of security support, only SSL, that’s it.”

At first, PayPal would warn users on the banned browser to hit the road, but would follow up with a ban if the user repeated visits.

This isn’t the biggest deal in the world since Apple can likely add the features to Safari rather quickly, and since I personally (and many others) find Safari to be a little bit buggy, many Mac users are probably already on Firefox already.

On another note, I recently transitioned from 17 years on a PC to a Mac, and find Safari to be a very weak browser. Often, it is slow to load sites that Firefox will quickly load, and it has a tendency to freeze up rather often (although, to be fair, Firefox has done this a few times also). Safari claims to be faster, but it’s not noticeable. I’ve had no problems at all with Leopard– not one crash in over a month of heavy use (though I don’t run any big apps) . The only other complaint I’d have about my iMac is that it came with a ridiculous 1GB of memory, which I quickly upgraded and noticed a massive difference. But otherwise, the Mac experience is treating me well.

Thanks to Gregg Keizer and Computer World for the PayPal story.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pmand is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.