Apple Shows Off Safari 5 Web Browser

The long expected release of the new iPhone 4 has dominated headlines, but Apple has also taken the wraps off Safari 5, the latest version of its web browser.

The latest edition features Safari Reader for reading articles on the web, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4 (based on an iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X 10.6.3, with 4GB of RAM) and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo or Bing as the search service.

Multiple Web Pages

Reader makes it possible to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a scrollable view without any additional content. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email. Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, the company said the latest version of Safari loads new web pages using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Available for both Mac and Windows, Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download.

The browser also includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen HTML5 technologies. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customise and the browsing experience, Apple said. Safari 5 also offers more than a dozen HTML5 features, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include geolocation, sectioning elements, draggable attribute, forms validation, Ruby, AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

Safari 5 for Mac OS X requires Leopard 10.5.8 or Snow Leopard 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.

Half A Billion

“Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices.”

In addition, Apple added the Safari Developer Program for free, which allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, helps simplify the development, installation and packaging of extensions. For enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.