Apple Releases Safari 5: The World's Fastest Internet Browser

On Monday, Apple released Safari 5. This is the latest version of the self-acclaimed world's fastest browser. Apple also claims that the browser is the most innovative web browser. I can't say that they are wrong, however there are other great browsers out there. But, it's not time to talk about those, it's time to talk about Apple and their browser!

Safari 5 features the new Safari Reader. This is for reading articles on the web without distraction. Safari 5 also has a 30% performance increase over Safari 4. You can choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as your search engine to use for Safari's search field.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="385" caption="Safari Reader, Image Credit: Apple Inc. "][/caption]
Safari 5 is available for both Mac and Windows. It also includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

“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.”

Safari Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email.

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Safari 5 added more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, these include full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

The new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions.

Safari Extensions are sandboxed for enhanced security and stability. They are also signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

All in all, the new Safari 5 is excellent. Much more features than Safari 4 and, it's perfectly timed. It has been released on the same day as the iPhone 4.