It’s very easy to forget that pretty much all the companies I write about and you read about in these columns are profit-making enterprises. So naturally they want good press, and will do what they can to get those favorable write-ups.

At the same time, a real journalist, as opposed to folks who just regurgitate press releases, will try to separate the facts from the corporate spin, sometimes without much success. If a company truly wants something secret, they can often succeed. You see, there’s not a whole lot of real investigative journalism in the tech world. We’re usually too busy just keeping up with what’s going on to actually separate the wheat from the chaff.

Take Microsoft, our favorite whipping boy — or whipping person if one wants to be politically correct about it. When they were immersed in that antitrust conflict with the U.S. Department of Justice, they said they only wanted to be free to innovate. But how often has Microsoft truly innovated, and not just imitated or made lavish promises they couldn’t keep?

You can take a look at the original promises for Longhorn, now known as Vista, to see about missed shipping dates and abandoned or repurposed features. But that’s nothing new for Microsoft. Back in the 1990s, they talked about something called Cairo, advanced operating system technologies that would ultimately match and surpass anything else on the market. It was all a bait and switch, however. A few of the technologies showed up in various shapes and forms, but many are still missing in action.

Apple had its own flirtation with this sort of thing, although I gather they did make an honest effort to produce Copland, an ambitious plan for an industrial-strength operating system that went nowhere. In the end, they bought NeXT, which brought back Steve Jobs — and the rest is history.

Well, not completely. How often did Steve Jobs demonstrate Rhapsody, the precursor to Mac OS X, and make promises before they could really be fulfilled?

Today Apple, for the most part at least, doesn’t make promises they can’t keep. In fact, they hardly makes promises at all, keeping most of their strategies and product road maps close to the vest. Only when it needs to bring in third parties — such as presenting a new operating system version or that change to Intel processors — does it deliver any specifies about future products and technologies. Or if it serves some future (usually unannounced) master plan, witness the introduction of the wireless television interface device that was code-named iTV.

Certainly, Apple will still engage in the proper amount of corporate spin. Whenever there’s a new version of Mac OS X in the offing, they’ll rag on Microsoft as nothing more than a blatant copycat. They are correct to a large degree, but don’t think that Apple is above cribbing a few ideas from others too if it suits its purposes.

When Apple isn’t around to spin a few tales, there are always the Mac rumor sites. Sure, some of what they say is true, sometimes so close to a real product that you have to wonder about their sources and who at Apple or one of its suppliers might be spilling the beans. At other times, though, when real information isn’t available, it almost seems as if they are tossing out lots and lots of claims, hoping a few might stick.

The mainstream press gets into the act as well. How much prose have you read about that iPhone? No, not the Internet phone recently introduced by Linksys, but Apple’s alleged entry into the mobile arena.

Of course, we all know that Apple has yet to announce any such thing. Sure you can find a few tidbits at the patent office, but just because Apple registers something doesn’t mean it’ll end up in a full-fledged product. Quite often the patent is applied for just to give them rights to a concept or technology should they decide to go to the next level.

You may want to tell me that there’s little doubt Apple will introduce a phone based on the iPod in the very near future — and I’ve begun to call it the iPod Phone for lack of a more imaginative title — and you may be right. But don’t assume anything about what form it’ll take. Remember, when it comes to creating corporate spin, Apple ranks with the best of them.

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As I write this, Mac OS X users don’t really have to worry about virus infections — at least for now. The ones that have been discovered have been test cases, proofs of concept, to show a potential vulnerability but not much more. Sure, one virus did sort of leap into the wild a while back, but hardly affected anyone.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t the potential for a malware infection. Every few weeks, Apple releases a security update to close system leaks. The latest, released Tuesday afternoon, addresses a potential threats involving QuickTime for Java and Quartz Composer in Mac OS X Tiger. According to Apple: “Java applets may use QuickTime for Java to obtain the images rendered on screen by embedded QuickTime objects and upload them to the originating web site. When this facility is used in conjunction with Quartz Composer, it becomes possible to capture images that may contain local information.”

While some of those updates have caused stability issues, most don’t, and even when problems occur, they appear to be few and far between. So there seems to be no reason to avoid the update, but I’ll let you know if there is.

At the same time, the folks at Mozilla updated Firefox 2.0 to version 2.0.0.1 to handle eight security flaws, five of which are considered “critical” by the security industry. They reportedly deal with RSS, Javascript and CSS code, among other things.

In both cases, it doesn’t seem as if anyone actually exploited these chinks in the armor, but Apple and Mozilla did their due diligence and took care of the problems before they could cause any troubles for anyone.

I should also mention that Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit released a “corrected” Office 2004 11.3.2 updater that addresses both security and stability. There was an 11.3.1 release that apparently got posted by mistake when the Mac BU was doing some test runs. It was quickly withdrawn, and folks who installed the update while it was available apparently didn’t have any problems to fret over. At least I didn’t. The problem is that the code hadn’t been tested.

Even though folks are quick to shout at Microsoft for even the tiniest mistakes, let’s be fair and point out that Apple has released updates prematurely as well. It happens.

The good thing about all these updates is that Mac users can feel a little more secure that the inevitable Mac OS X malware outbreak has been postponed for at least another day. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, that it can’t happen. I suspect Internet criminals would love to be the first to boast they produced a Mac OS X malignancy that spread far and wide in the Mac universe. After all, it did happen in the days of the Classic Mac OS, so why can’t it happen now?

I won’t dwell on the higher level of security offered by Unix-based operating systems. Instead I’ll remind you that the very first computer virus was created on the Unix platform, long, long ago. That’s something you shouldn’t forget.

Beyond that, I’m am sure some elements of the tech community will use this opportunity to engage in their own viral behavior by spreading misinformation about Mac virus threats. Headlines will burst forth from the usual offenders, and the best thing to do is ignore them.

At the same time, if you intend on sharing files with a Windows user, it doesn’t hurt to be armed with some sort of protection, or just be very careful. The things that won’t affect you can be brutal on a Windows PC. Even the virtual machine environment that you find on Parallels Desktop should be protected.

Also you’ll want to be prepared. At the first inkling of a widespread Mac OS X virus — and it will happen someday — you should be ready to download software to protect yourself. The commercial products aren’t expensive, and, with a decently fast connection and a small deduction from your credit card or bank account, you’ll be able to arm yourself real fast.

For now, just be on the alert, but don’t let anyone make you paranoid. There’s more than enough going on out there to do that task nicely as it is.

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Believe me when I tell you that I have spent a fair amount of time working in all the popular browsers on the Mac platform and sometimes even under Windows. I’ve also read the reviews, just to see if other tech publications react the same as I do, and there is one significant omission in most of those articles, one that I consider important.

Understand that the first job of a browser is to deliver pages speedily and accurately. No single browser is 100% successful at this task, even if it passes the appropriate canned testing routines. One site will look great in one browser, and awful in another.

A few demand Microsoft Internet Explorer, and don’t seem to understand that it’s losing market share, and they are also losing access to millions of potential customers. Take the real estate industry, for example, and certain multiple listing systems. Even if nobody else needed, say, Parallels Desktop to run Windows on a Mac, realtors would be able to make the company live long and prosper.

As I’ve said previously, I have, in recent years, used Safari as my default browser. It’s not that it is the greatest application of this sort on the planet, necessarily, but it seems to do most everything well. I can view most pages without encountering any weird anomalies — and keep the phrase “most pages” in mind — and it can print well-formatted versions of those pages.

However, Safari can be troublesome when I edit pages for The Mac Night Owl in WordPress, the open-source publishing system that we use. The main shortcoming is the lack of the navigation bar that appears in Firefox and — sometimes at any rate — in Opera. That and a few other troublesome matters, plus speedier rendering, made me finally move to Firefox as the default browser.

But there are exceptions, and those exceptions are found in that gray area that Firefox won’t address until version 3, and that’s printing.

Now isn’t a browser supposed to free you from the tethers of output devices and paper? Not necessarily. Indeed, there are times when a proper printing capability is absolutely essential.

Say you place an order at Amazon or any other online retailer. You can, of course, save a file of a receipt, but you might prefer to have a hard copy to store with your business records, or just to refer to when you’re not using a computer.

Maybe you read an interesting article at Google News and wanted to refer to it during lunch, or when there was nothing to read when flying to a corporate gathering. Regardless of your needs and your reasoning, if a browser fails at that task, you are forced to use another application to accomplish the task or do without.

Here’s where Firefox fails — and little is said about it.

While most sites print all right, even if it requires using the specially formatted Print version on a site, some do not. The placement of graphics overlaps the text, or just the first page of a document that would fill two or more pages appears in your printer’s output tray.

Opera does a little better on some sites, and worse on others. If there’s an area where Safari and other browsers based on Apple’s WebKit emerge supreme, it’s printing. Even if you don’t use a site’s Print option — assuming one is even available — you’ll get a pretty good representation of what you see on the screen.

In version 3 of Firefox, they’ll use Mozilla’s new Cairo graphics library, which, among other things, “is designed to produce identical output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available (eg. through the X Render Extension or OpenGL).” I can’t wait, but why are so many other tech writers uninterested in such things?

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