Some may have noticed that when they installed Safari they got a new service called Bonjour as well. I didn't know what it was at first but when I complained about it someone pointed out http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/ Basically it is Apple's networking platform. Yep apparently Jobs thinks that Windows users have a hard time networking their computers and needed a little of his help so Bonjour is installed along side Safari. If you have problems hooking up to networks or have frequent need to network to Macs, Bonjour may be of use to you. If, however, you are having no problems accomplishing the networking tasks you need to do, my advice would be to NOT allow Bonjour to be installed (and uninstall it if it is installed). Why? because it is putting all kinds of hooks into your networking processes. For example, when I went to uninstall Bonjour it complained that it needed to close Photoshop (which had a network file open), Opera and Firefox. Look the more things you have on your computer trying to make networking "easier" for you the more likely it is that you are opening yourself up to serious security issues and the more things you have to worry about. Why open yourself up to unnecessary vectors of attack? Never install networking stuff you don't need. If you blindly installed Safari in its typical configuration, you can go in and uninstall Bonjour as follows: 1) Go into "Add/Remove Programs" under your control panel, then look for and select "Safari". 2) Click on the "change" button, then click on "change" again in the windows that is displayed. 3) Click on the "install Bonjour service" drop down and change to "this feature will be removed" (a red 'x' will appear next to this option). Then click on "install". This will remove Bonjour. If you are installing Safari for the first time, take the custom installation route and make sure to disable the installation of Bonjour. Remember Safari is beta software and do you really want beta software to have hooks into your other networking services? I didn't think so.
Thanks. I remember thinking it was a virus after seeing "Bonjour Service" in my task manager process list. Although it wasn't after installing Safari, maybe it was Quicktime? (not the one bundled with Safari, didn't download that version) Deleted it anyway after finding out what it was. And what a stupid name...
I've heard that Photoshop CS3 also installs the Bonjour service so I suspect Apple is using many channels to try and push this out. This smells way too much like the trojan tactics of adware companies.
Bonjour is a discovery service for devices - that's all. It's similar to Window's Network Neighborhood, only it works.