PayPal is advising its customers to avoid Safari browser if they want to stay protected from online fraud, PC World reported. And there is one logical explanation to all that, PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett explained: Apple’s browser lacks two important anti-phishing security features.

“Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect our customers,” Barrett said to PC World. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

Unlike other browsers, Safari, which is the default browser on the Macintosh computers and the iPhone, has no built-in phishing filter to keep users informed when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, and at the same time lacks the Extended Validation (EV) certificates, which turns the address bar green if the visited site is legitimate.

“Safari has got nothing in terms of security support, only SSL (Secure Sockets Layer encryption), that’s it,” Michael Barrett also said, as quoted by the same source, which is not the case for other browsers that already support EV certificates.

According to PayPal, their clients are more likely to sign in to PayPal’s Web site when they’re using other browsers than Safari, because they know they are much safer: “I’d love to say that Safari was a safer browser, but at this point it isn’t,” Barrett concluded.

Despite the lack of EV technology however, a study showed that without training or simply knowing about their existence, people are most likely not to notice the green bar notification indicating a legitimate Web site.

Since Apple launched the Safari browser, it has gained more and more users, whether Mac or Windows fans, reaching a usage share of 5.82 percent in January 2008. Apple was not available for comment.