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If you’re using Apple’s Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.

Safari doesn’t make PayPal’s list of recommended browsers because it doesn’t have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer.

“Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers,” Barrett said in an interview. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

Safari is the default browser on Apple’s Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera run on the Mac.
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Microsoft Corp. gave early testers their first glimpse of its next-generation Web browser Wednesday, and said Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to the same standards as competitors’ programs.Microsoft’s browsers, including the current Internet Explorer 7, gained notoriety among Web developers for handling Web page code differently than Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, Apple Inc.’s Safari, the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and others.

For the most part, major non-Microsoft browsers and outside developers who built Web pages worked with agreed-upon technical standards, while Microsoft was accused of adding proprietary code to those standards. The result: Web pages that looked good in Internet Explorer but broke on other browsers, or vice versa.

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Kate Burns, one of Google’s first employees outside the US and its first UK managing director, has been hired to run the British operation of YouTube competitor Dailymotion.

Burns, who joins as the first UK managing director of Dailymotion, has the job of increasing the online video website’s user numbers, the amount of user-generated and official content uploaded, and boosting revenues.

She will report to the Dailymotion chief executive, Mark Zaleski, who was appointed last July and is based in Paris. Zaleski was previously chief executive of auction website QXL Ricardo.
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Microsoft has reversed its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested.

Wow. And even more surprising is their reason for making the change. In Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 on the IEBlog, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch says:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

And in a press release titled Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie states that
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As it scrambles to avoid defeat in its battle with Microsoft, Yahoo may try to put a little more time on the clock.

Microsoft, whose offer for Yahoo is now worth $41.2 billion, was preparing to escalate its takeover fight by starting a proxy contest next week. But in an effort to delay that move, Yahoo is considering several options, including a plan to postpone its annual meeting, people close to the company said on Tuesday.

The maneuver comes as Yahoo has stepped up merger and joint venture talks with AOL, a unit of Time Warner, these people said.

Microsoft had been preparing to nominate a slate of directors to the board of Yahoo by next Thursday, the deadline for mounting a proxy contest. If Yahoo moves back that deadline back or postpones its meeting, something it could announce as early as this week, the company could buy time to seek out and evaluating alternatives.
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