T-Mobile is firing up the iPhone compatibility, Apple’s jettisoning some VPN functionality, and Google is swapping out browser engines. The remainders for Friday, April 5, 2013 are not your friend.

Apple iOS Software Overview: iPhone (T-Mobile)

T-Mobile is now offering an over-the-air carrier update to enable Visual Voicemail, HD Voice, and LTE on compatible iPhones on its network. … Hey, is that a giant cartoon dust cloud where AT&T’s customers used to be?

Tim Cook’s Apology Letter to Apple Customers in China (Forbes)

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The particulars change, but the general rule doesn’t: Don’t install software you’re not certain you can trust. A new Trojan horse targeting Mac users tries to trick you into installing it by prompting you to install a browser plug-in when you visit a compromised or malicious webpage.

Dr.Web, a Russian anti-virus and security company, dubs the malware Trojan.Yontoo.1. Unknowing Web surfers who attempt to view video trailers are told that a necessary plug-in is missing. If you click to get the plug-in, an installer for something called FreeTwitTube appears.

But rather than installing FreeTwitTube, the software instead installs a Yontoo plug-in for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. The plug-in inserts ads and other content onto other webpages as you surf. The real risk with browser extension-based malware is that such extensions can easily access and execute remote code—and monitor the URLs you visit, along with the content of those pages. It doesn’t appear that Yontoo does that... yet.

You can check if you’re a Yontoo victim by reviewing your browser’s installed plug-ins. Deleting the extension should be enough to rid your Mac of the malware.

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Longtime readers of the Mac Gems column know that I’m a keyboard person. With few exceptions, I prefer to keep my fingers on the keyboard and off my mouse, trackpad, or trackball—sticking to the keyboard is better ergonomically, and it’s often faster, as well.

But there’s one app where it’s been difficult for me to go keyboard-only: my Web browser. There’s no easy—or fast—way to use the keyboard to navigate websites, open links, and the like. OS X includes some special accessibility features that let you use the keyboard for these tasks, but those features were designed with accessibility, not productivity, in mind.

So I was happy to discover Vimari, an extension for Safari, based on the nifty Vimium extension for Chrome, that lets you open links and more using the keyboard. (Vimari is much more limited than Vimium, focusing on links; Vimium provides a slew of additional navigation shortcuts.)

Once you’ve installed the Vimari extension in Safari, pressing Vimari’s Link Hint shortcut (by default, Control+F) places a two-letter keyboard shortcut, highlighted in yellow, over every link on the current webpage. Shortcuts for links in particular areas of the screen tend to start with the same letter: For example, as you can see in the screenshot to the right, links in the navigation bar at the top of the webpage have shortcuts beginning with D; shortcuts for links in the middle of the page start with K.

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Little things mean a lot—especially when tiny tips save time. Ramp up your Web-browsing skills with these speed-friendly techniques for Safari 6.

1. Open a link in a new tab

When you type something into Safari's Address Search Field and click Return to see the top search hit, the new page replaces the current one, as you'd expect. But if you want to keep the current page around, you can: Press Command-Return to open the top hit in a new tab, or press Shift-Return to open it in a new window.

2. Jump to the Address Search Field

Want to enter a URL or search string, but don’t want to take your hands off the keyboard to click? You can move into the combo address/search field by using either of the keyboard commands formerly used for the separate address and search fields: Command-L or Command-Option-F.

3. Bookmark a page instantly

Create a new bookmark on the bookmarks bar by dragging the favicon (the icon in front of the URL) from the address field into the bookmarks bar. The bookmark's default name will be selected, so you can immediately type in a new one if you want to.

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Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s battle for the home has begun in earnest; elsewhere, Apple’s in a non-patentable pinch, Passbook is passing go, and you could have been reading this in Apple Freedom. The remainders for Thursday, December 20, 2012 are protecting the home front.

Home-Automation Startup R2 Studios in Acquisition Talks (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

Blake Krikorian, the man who founded Slingbox maker Sling Media, has a new jam: a home automation company by the name of R2 Studios. More interesting by far are rumors that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all in talks to acquire the firm. I can already see the Apple marketing campaign: “Turns out we do do windows.” Zing.

Apple ‘pinch-to-zoom’ patent invalidated by USPTO (AppleInsider)

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Google this week announced it had shipped a stronger Flash Player sandbox for the OS X version of Chrome, making good on an August promise to ship a Mac browser better able to ward off exploits of the Adobe software.

Chrome 23, which launched Nov. 6, completed Google’s efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Google’s own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.

By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Google’s engineers were able to place the Adobe plug-in in a “sandbox” as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself.

A sandbox is an anti-exploit technology that isolates processes on a computer, preventing or at least hindering malware from exploiting an unpatched vulnerability, escalating privileges and planting attack code on the system.

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Safari for iOS was already perhaps the best mobile browser on the market. But in iOS 6, Apple has added a few features that provide much-requested functionality, as well as some minor tweaks that improve performance.

iCloud Tabs

If you’ve ever found yourself viewing a webpage in Safari on your iPhone and wanting to view it on the larger screen of your iPad or Mac instead—or, conversely, reading an article on your Mac and wanting to transfer it to your iPhone as you walk out the door—iCloud Tabs is for you. This feature syncs any open tabs among your Macs and iOS devices configured with the same iCloud account. Instead of going through the hassle of emailing one or more URLs to yourself, you can quickly view—on the device you’re currently using—any tab open on any of your iCloud-synced devices.

To access this feature, you first need to ensure that all your devices are configured with the same iCloud account. On  devices running iOS 6, you configure your iCloud account in the iCloud screen of the Settings app; on Macs running Mountain Lion, you use the iCloud pane of System Preferences. On both platforms, be sure that Safari is enabled in the list of data to sync. (Note that if you have multiple iCloud accounts configured on your iOS device or Mac, only the main account—the one configured in iCloud settings, rather than in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars screen in iOS or in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane in OS X—can use iCloud Tabs.)

Once configured, iCloud Tabs automatically syncs open browser tabs across all your devices—assuming that those devices have Internet access, of course. On the iPad, you'll see an iCloud icon in the Safari toolbar; tap that to get a list of the tabs open on your other devices. On your iPhone, you tap the Bookmarks button and then select iCloud Tabs. (If you’re already in a sublist in the Bookmarks list, tap the left-facing arrow until you reach the top level, titled Bookmarks.) Tabs are grouped by device, and each tab’s entry shows the name of the webpage and its URL; tap any item in the list to open that webpage on your device.

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Reader Jay Lindell has a problem feeding Safari. He writes:

I’m running Mountain Lion and, with it, Safari 6. I understand that Safari no longer displays RSS feeds but instead sends them to a dedicated RSS reader. I have a couple of RSS readers and chose one originally but would prefer to use another. Unfortunately I don’t see any setting for changing which reader Safari opens. How do I do that?

I’m in the same boat. Like you, I have a couple of different RSS readers on my Mac. As you suggest, Safari gloms on to the one you chose the first time and, from then on, opens it when you click on an RSS link.

The solution is to turn to a third-party. In my case I chose Rubicode’s free RCDefaultApp. This is a very handy preference pane that allows you to associate such things as file types, media types, and feeds with specific applications. In our case, we want to associate RSS feeds with one application or another.

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Mozilla released Firefox 15.0.1 on Thursday in order to fix a bug that potentially exposed the websites visited by users while in “Private Browsing” mode.

The goal of the “Private Browsing” mode is to enable Firefox users to surf the Web without leaving any traces of the visited websites behind.

According to a support article on Mozilla’s website, while running in Private Browsing mode the browser shouldn’t save visited pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, download entries, cookies, or temporary Internet files, which are collectively known as cached Web content.

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The designers of high-end sports cars often strip their cars of every inessential component, just to coax the greatest power and speed from their creations. Google’s Chrome reminds me of those speed demons: It lacks the fit and finish of Apple’s Safari ( ), but man, does it ever burn (virtual) rubber.

Built for speed

I’m not sure which is faster: Chrome itself, or the browser’s development cycle. To watch the version numbers blur by, you’d expect big changes in the browser’s look and feel. But on startup, Chrome 21 looks a lot like last year’s Chrome 8, right down to the annoyingly persistent rough edges on its interface.

You still can’t open all the bookmarks in a given folder without awkwardly right-clicking, selecting a command from a contextual menu, and clicking OK in a nagging dialogue box. You can’t switch into privacy-protecting Incognito mode on the fly, but instead must open an entire new window. When you navigate back and forth, pages don’t so much slide as simply appear. These are minor details, for certain, but their absence suggests that Google’s coders care more about the technical side of their browser than the way it interacts with humans.

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I recently stumbled over two Safari-related problems. In each case, specific features of a website did not work as expected. While my precise symptoms may be limited in scope, the overall problems are general ones and the solutions apply to a wide variety of similar situations.

Extension prevents Flash video from running

One of my guilty pleasures is the NBC series Smash. I’m especially a fan of the show’s music. That’s why I was glad to discover that NBC offers video clips showcasing the musical numbers from the series.

Unfortunately, when I attempted to view any of the Smash clips, I got nowhere. The rotating circle that indicates a video is loading just kept rotating, apparently intending to do so forever. No error message appeared. But neither did the video.

As a first diagnostic step, I shifted from Safari to Firefox. The videos played just fine in Firefox. This suggested that the problem was more likely with my installation of Safari than with the NBC website. Returning to Safari, I next checked what extensions I was running. As the videos were Flash-based, I first turned my attention to ClickToFlash.

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Maxthon 1.0.3, a browser made in China that has made it to the U.S. and the Mac, is a blisteringly fast, undeniably slick way to navigate the web.

It’s also Google Chrome—well, mostly Google Chrome, or at least its open-source sibling Chromium. Nods to Mozilla, WebKit, Darwin, and seemingly every other open-source browser framework also show up in the program’s documentation.

Maxthon doesn’t try to conceal its origins. From the look, feel, and usability of the bookmarks bar, to the option to open a “new Incognito window,” to the distinctive arrow graphics that appear at the edges of a page when you navigate forward or back, Maxthon might as well be Chrome. One dialog box even refers to a menu with a wrench icon—a feature in Chrome that appears nowhere in Maxthon’s reskinned interface. (To its credit, Maxthon’s about box has the courtesy to credit its Chromium origins.)

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Mozilla will drop support for Apple’s OS X 10.5, or Leopard, after it ships Firefox 16 in October, according to company developers.

“We are not planning to support Mac OS X 10.5 with Firefox 17,” said Josh Aas, who works on the Firefox platform group, in a message last month on Bugzilla. “The builds will fail to run on anything less than Mac OS X 10.6.”

OS X 10.6 is Snow Leopard, the 2009 follow-up to Leopard, which shipped in October 2007.

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Adobe Systems released fixes on Tuesday for six critical vulnerabilities affecting its Flash multimedia application and AIR runtime, five of which could allow for remote code execution on a system.

The updates affect Windows, Mac, Linux, Google Chrome and users of Android 2.x, 3.x and 4.x devices, Adobe said in its advisory.

The patches address four memory corruption vulnerabilities—CVE-2012-4163, CVE-2012-4164, CVE-2012-4165 and CVE-2012-4166—and an integer overflow vulnerability, CVE-2012-4167. Also fixed is a cross-domain information leak vulnerability, CVE-2012-4168.

“These updates address vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system,” Adobe said.

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Oracle announced on Tuesday that it has released Java SE7 Update 6 for OS X, bringing full support for the latest version of the cross-platform technology to the Mac.

The release includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for OS X, as well as the Java Development Kit (JDK), the JavaFX 2.2 rich client platform, and the new JavaFX Scene Builder.

The JRE will allow OS X users to run Java applications and applets, while the JDK and JavaFX platform lets programmers build Java software right on their Mac, in some cases even allowing them to provide a more platform-native experience for users.

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A new operating system means new reader tips, and we’ve been getting plenty of them for Mountain Lion. Here are two quick ones for two of the most popular OS X apps.

First, if you previously used iChat to send and receive screen shots or graphics, you may have used Quick Look to view them. More specifically, if you had the iChat File Transfers window open, you could click on an inline graphic that someone sent you in a chat and press the space bar to preview it with OS X's built-in file-viewer. In Mountain Lion’s Messages app, this no longer works. You can, however, click on the graphic right in the Messages window, then press the space bar to view the image in Quick Look.

Second, you no longer need to right-click and summon the Edit Name dialog to rename a bookmark in Safari's Bookmarks Bar. Now, in Safari 6, you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become editable, so you can rename it then and there. This applies to Safari 6 as a whole, which is provided with Mountain Lion, but which is also available for Mac OS X 10.7.

Google will pay a historic fine to settle U.S. government charges that it violated privacy laws when it tracked users of Apple’s Safari browser via cookies.

The $22.5 million civil penalty is the largest ever secured by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for a violation of one of its orders.

In its complaint, which it referred to the U.S. Department of Justice, the FTC said that Google falsely told Safari users that it wouldn’t place tracking cookies on their devices or serve them targeted ads.

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Google announced this week that it had wrapped up work on a stronger Flash sandbox in the Windows version of Chrome, and would soon ship the same for its OS X browser.

Chrome 21, which launched July 31, completed efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Google’s own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.

By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Google’s engineers were able to stuff the Adobe plug-in into a “sandbox” as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself.

“Windows Flash is now inside a sandbox that’s as strong as Chrome’s native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything else available,” Justin Schuh, a Chrome engineer, in a post to the Chromium blog Wednesday.

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Safari 5.1 didn’t age gracefully on my older hardware. While Apple’s Web browser still posted fast benchmarks, it grew teeth-grindingly sluggish when loading or navigating multiple tabs. Under Lion, Safari 6 similarly left me more aggravated than appreciative.

But under Mountain Lion, the new Safari became a whole different animal.

The king is dead

Safari 6 packs relatively few new features for a major browser update, and most of its shiny new bells and whistles need Mountain Lion to run properly.

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Last year, Macworld checked in with Mozilla’s Firefox 5. Since then, an accelerated release cycle has rocketed the popular open-source browser nine full version numbers ahead. While its developers have bundled in several welcome improvements in that time, anyone using Firefox 14 won’t find too many new features, unless you happen to be a Web developer.

Bring on the newness

Like many of its recent updates, Firefox 14 bundles in just a handful of new features. Most notably, it now submits all Google searches securely via HTTPS, whether through the “awesome bar,” the search bar, or by right-clicking on selected text. This purportedly keeps any third parties between you and Google from seeing what you’re searching for—a handy tool for those using Firefox in less democratic regions.

Having previously added Mac OS gesture support (albeit without Safari’s slick graphical flair), Firefox 14 now fully embraces Lion’s Fullscreen mode. If you care to dive into the program’s configuration files, you can also tell the browser not to load Flash or any other plugins unless you first click to authorize them—an ability previously only available through third-party extensions.

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Each week, we use the Weekly Wrap to point you toward all of our biggest stories from the past seven days. This week, we’re going to make sure that you don’t miss a single morsel of our Mountain Lion coverage.

It all began on July 24: As Apple reported its third quarter results—CEO Tim Cook dropped the news that Mountain Lion would ship the following day. (Mr. Cook had plenty else to say, too.)

And indeed, true to its word, Apple launched Mountain Lion in the Mac App Store. Jason Snell, of course, wrote the review—and offered up a video review, too.

Next, the Macworld staff offered up deep dives into a slew of Mountain Lion’s new features, including:

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While Mountain Lion may be getting all the attention, users of OS X Lion have a couple of software updates to grab as well on Wednesday. Among the most significant is Safari 6 for Lion, which brings many of the same features included in the Mountain Lion version of Apple’s Web browser—though not all of them.

Like its Mountain Lion counterpart, Safari for Lion’s most obvious difference is the new Unified Smart Search Field, which combines the location bar and search bar into a single field. You can type in either a URL or a search term, in which case Safari will suggest answers based on your bookmarks and history, as well as pulling up common search queries from your search engine of choice.

Lion users also get the ability to read pages in their Reading List while offline, the ability to select the Chinese-language Baidu as their default search engine, and a Do Not Track option in the browser’s Privacy preferences. (The last is also automatically enabled when you use Private Browsing mode.) There’s also a new password pane for managing your saved website logins.

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Safari has been around forever, and you might not think there was much that Apple could do to improve it in Mountain Lion. But in fact the company has found some clever—and welcome—ways to update the app many of use more than any other.

One way Apple's done that is by taking some inspiration from other browsers. The obvious one is the new unified address and search bar. Like Google Chrome, Safari 6.0 has just one text box up top, instead of one box for Web addresses and another for searching. Type a URL in Safari's new universal address box, and the browser will go to that site. Type in something else, and Safari will perform a search for it.

More specifically, as you type, it'll show you a drop-down list of possible hits. First there's a section it calls Top Hits—the things it guesses you're looking for, based on your previous browsing patterns. After that are some possible search terms you might want to use on Google, the default search engine. (You can, of course, change that default in the app's preferences.) And below that are matching hits in your browsing history and bookmarks.

The other way Apple has updated Safari on the Mac is something it's done throughout Mountain Lion: tying the desktop OS and its apps more tightly than ever to iOS and iCloud.

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1. Select Safari’s address field

Sometimes I copy a URL and want to paste it into Safari’s address field. Instead of using the tab key, or a mouse or trackpad, to select the field, I prefer using the Command-L keyboard shortcut. This highlights the text in the field, and I can then paste my URL and press Return to go to a webpage.

In Mountain Lion, you can also press Command-Option-F to go to that field, since it also serves as a search field.

2. Jump to what’s currently playing in iTunes

I often have iTunes running while I work, and I often browse my library, or the iTunes Store while I’m listening to music. But sometimes I want to come back to the music I’m playing: either in a playlist or in my Music library. A little-known keyboard shortcut, Command-L, does just this. It highlights the current track, and changes the view so you can see exactly where it is.

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Google has quietly changed the way Chrome browser adds extensions, blocking automatic installs from all but those downloaded through the company’s Chrome Web store.

The motivation for the modification is security. Previously, extensions could be installed by any website without user intervention, an obvious boon for malicious attacks.

“In the latest version of Google Chrome, you must explicitly tell Chrome that you want to install these extensions by adding them through the Extensions page,” Google said, a way of forcing users to pay attention to non-approved software.

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Google will pull the plug for Chrome running on OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, after it releases version 21, which is currently in beta and will reach the browser’s “stable” channel sometime next month, the company has announced.

Chrome 22, the browser that just landed in the “dev” channel—Google maintains three primary builds for its browser, with the dev line the roughest-edged—will not run on OS X 10.5.

“Google Chrome on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will stop receiving any updates following Chrome 21,” Google said on its support site. “This includes new features, security fixes and stability updates.”

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