[Stop, Drop, and Roll]

Safari was taking up a lot of my CPU after I had saved a couple bookmarks from a not-so-well-known news website. The CPU would only work intensely when Safari was on. After erasing the bookmarks and restarting Safari, everything went back to normal, and I didn't have any trouble with Safari after that.

This experience, however, has left me worrying about my Mac's security, and causes me to wonder the following:

Can a Mac's security be compromised by a bookmark?
Can a bookmark corrupt other bookmarks?

I'm trying to understand what these bookmarks might have been doing.



I would greatly appreciate any help on this.
Thanks

[Siriusfox]

Stop, Drop, and Roll, on September 17th 2008, 05:51 PM, said:

Can a Mac's security be compromised by a bookmark?

No. Such an act would require that there was a specific bug in Safari that would allow a specific string to trigger some sort of code execution. However, it is highly unlikely that such an event would happen.

Stop, Drop, and Roll, on September 17th 2008, 05:51 PM, said:

Can a bookmark corrupt other bookmarks?

Maybe. Bookmarks in Safari aren't stored as individual parts. If the URL or bookmark name breaks then nothing would happen. This however should never happen, as single character corruption is very very unlikely. What is possible, is that the file as a whole may become corrupt and unreadable. In such a case, the whole set of bookmarks would become unusable.

To me it sounds like your problem is caused by extra RSS reading. Safari will still download and update RSS feeds in your Bookmarks menu, and by default there are MANY MANY RSS feeds in Safari, some of which are in that menu. These could be causing your slowdown. Uncheck Safari -> Preferences -> RSS -> Bookmarks Menu to disable this, it might help.