It is common knowledge that a strong password contains characters from the largest character set possible; that is, a password made up of letters (A-Z) is weaker than a password consisting of letters and numbers, which is weaker than a password that contains letters, numbers, and symbols such as $, @, or &. This is because the larger the character set, the longer it will take to guess or crack the password.

History has shown that users will choose passwords that have the following qualities, in order of importance:

1. Easy to remember.
2. Easy to input.
3. (If at all) hard to guess.

A memorable password is worthless if it takes more than a few seconds to type, and an easily typed password is worthless if it can't be remembered. So typically, savvy computer users will pick a password that strikes a balance between the first two qualities, and some might take a moment to make it harder to guess by appending an arbitrary letter or number to the end. This is what causes passwords like password4 or vikings96.

But when using the Apple iPhone to enter text in a password field, what characters is the user presented with?

Letters only, with numbers and symbols hidden in secondary and tertiary keyboards. The extra effort needed to find and type a number (or an underscore, in the third keyboard removed) each time they enter a password will cause some people to either change their current passwords to be alphabetic or at least do so when choosing new passwords. If Apple wanted to encourage good password selection, the keyboard for a password field should at least look something like this:

The shift key would transform 0-9 into their traditional shift alternatives, and all of the keys would still be available in a secondary menu, if desired. However, if Apple wanted to make a truly game-changing move, they'd make the default password keyboard look like this:

Of course, that might be a little drastic. :-)

I've been playing around with the beta release of Safari on Windows XP, and here are my initial experiences and impressions: (I don't use Safari on the Mac all that often, so I'm not claiming that these are bugs in Safari for Windows only.)

• Bookmarks importing does not work. It didn't auto-detect any of my Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, or Navigator profiles like the webpage said it would on its first run, and it also doesn't do anything when I choose "Import bookmarks" from the File menu and give it a bookmarks file to import.
• The tab and status bars are hidden by default, which is a shame. Tabbed browsing should be given the spotlight, and the status bar is where most people look to see where the link they're about to click is going to take them.
• Looking at the browser's UI and rendered pages literally hurts my eyes. It may be due to some font setting on my computer, but while Firefox/Navigator/IE on my computer all look fine, any text in Safari (including the menu options) is slightly blurry. I won't be able to stand this for any extended amount of time.
• Doesn't support middle-clicking on tabs to close them. This will frustrate me very quickly.
• Using a blue icon that says "RSS" instead of the de facto standard orange feed icon? Lame. However, their actual feed viewer is very nice.
• Clicking on the "Add Bookmark" toolbar button and then pressing either "Cancel" or "Add" in the resulting dialog crashes the browser. Every time. (Turns out that the same thing happens when closing the Toolbar Customization dialog.)
• It doesn't support adding more search engines, as far as I can tell. Yahoo! and Google are all I can have?
• I can't get it to display XML files as anything other than plain text.

So, while I'm glad that Apple has taken the step of releasing their browser for Windows (we welcome any competition), I'm not that impressed with the actual offering. (It kind of reminds me of Firefox 1.0 - much better than Internet Explorer, but not nearly as good as any recent Mozilla (or Netscape) browsers.) I'll submit these bug reports to Apple and hope for something usable when Beta 2 comes out.