Today Apple announced the release of its latest version of the Safari browser. Safari 5, says the company, will perform 30% faster than the previous version.
Apple did not announce Safari 5 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, but only in press release. Neither the browser nor the developer package are available on the Apple site as of press time. While writing this story, the URL for the press release ceased functioning. We have a question in to Apple but have not heard a response as we post.
Safari 5, for both Mac and PC, features a new Safari Reader for reading articles online and allows the user and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing to power its search field.
The Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize Safari 5 with extensions based on standard tech like HTML5, CSS3 and Java. Safari Extensions are sand-boxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.
When Safari Reader detects an article, an icon appears in the address field. Click it and it will display the whole article on one clean page, presumably without links, sidebars or dancing banditos. Think print-ready page. There are options to enlarge, print or send via email.
5 uses the Nitro JavaScript engine. According to Apple, it does some heavy lifting.
- Runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6
- Loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching
- Improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly
Heavy on HTML5, the new browser allows full-screen playback and closed captions; geolocation, sectioning elements, draggable attribute, forms validation, Ruby, AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.
Update: Yeah, it does. Safari 5 was demoed at WWDC about half an hour ago. It is now available for download.
