Google is being sued over a privacy breach through the Apple Safari web browser. Google was able to bypass computer settings that was designed to block the online activity of users. Safari is the primary browser on Mac OS X, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. “Google’s willful and knowing actions violated” federal laws and other computer related statutes, stated the attorneys of Matthew Soble. The privacy violations were discovered by researchers at Stanford University. The Apple Safari settings were designed for blocking cookies used for following users’ activities on the Internet. Google was outed by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. [BusinessWeek]

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about how Google has been able to bypass the privacy settings of millions of Safari users. Google had installed cookies that could track the browsing habits of people even though they thought it was blocked.

After updating Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS to version 4.2, the Safari browser has seen some enhancements. Some of the improvements include accelerometer and gyroscope support. There is also WebSockets and an updated HTML5 form support. Apple has released API documentation for the accelerometer and gyroscope here: DeviceMotionEvent Class Reference and DeviceOrientation Class Reference. [AppAdvice]

Apple just announced that Safari 5 is now available. Safari 5 has a 30% performance increase over Safari 4. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can be selected as the default search. Safari 5 also has improved developer tools and over a dozen new HTML5 technologies. Press release after the jump.

A new WebKit framework for the open source Web browser layout engine was unveiled this past Thursday. Dubbed WebKit2, there will be a “split process model” for keeping web content such as HTML, JavaScript, and other layouts in separate processes in browsers such as Apple Safari and Mobile Safari.

WebKit is the layout engine that Google Chrome, the Android web browser, and Palm’s WebOS uses. “WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process,” stated Anders Carlsson. “This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.”

Each tab in a browser is “sandboxed” in its own space. Below are some additional bullet points about WebKit2:

-Notification style client callbacks (e.g. didFinishLoadForFrame) These inform the embedder that something has happened, but do not give them the chance to do anything about it.
-Policy style clients callbacks (e.g. decidePolicyForNavigationAction) These allow the embedder to decide on an action at their leisure, notifying the page through a listener object.
-Policy settings (e.g. WKContextSetCacheModel, WKContextSetPopupPolicy) These allow the embedder to opt into a predefined policy without any callbacks into the UIProcess. These can either be an enumerated set of specific policies, or something more fine-grained, such as a list of strings with wildcards.
-Injected code (e.g. WebBundle) Code can be loaded into the WebProcess for cases where all the other options fail. This can useful when access to the DOM is required. [Planned, but not currently implemented]

[WebKit2 Release via AppleInsider]