Last week, PayPal's Chief Information Security Officer, Michael Barrett, posted a white paper called "A Practical Approach to Managing Phishing," in which the browser is seen as a key point in stopping phishing. Obviously, the first barrier is the email server - if the emails are properly filtered, they won't make it to the mailbox, so the user can't become a victim of phishing, but since phishing and spam are somehow related, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
In the same document, Barrett said PayPal is working in providing features that will allow the site to warn, and even block, any user that uses an old or insecure browser. IE 7 and the upcoming Firefox 3, for example, support Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer, or shortly EV SSL, an authentification feature that turns the address bar green and identifies the company running the site, while Safari is not yet capable of this, ended up in being placed in the same category of "very old and vulnerable" browsers, together with the 10 year old IE 4!
Well, I just visited my PayPal account in Safari, as you can see in the image at the beginning of the article, and everything was fine, so I can only hope that Apple will manage to keep up with the latest security technologies and avoid its users being blocked by PayPal. After all, it would be a pity to see this happening, while the market share of this browser is slowly, but surely, going up.