Apple Releases Safari 5 Web Browser
Email
Print
In the shadow of the iPhone 4 launch, Apple releases the latest version of its Safari Web Browser, which features Safari Reader for improved Web document reading and more than a dozen HTML5 features.
While most of the Apple-centric stories on Monday concerned the debut of the worst kept secret in the technology world, the latest edition of the iPhone,
Apple also released 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.
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
e-mail. 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
customize 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. "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.
