After almost a year the Safari 4 was released and now here comes the Safari 5. This latest version was released rather quietly. The fact to note is that the mention of the browser was missing in the Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2010.
The Safari 5 is all to compete with its nearest rival the Google Chrome. The advancement is thirty percent over Safari 4. It has all the features to offer tough competition to Chrome. There are a host of features that were desirable in the previous version; the Safari 5. It is said that the new advanced browser is very fast. In fact Apple has asserted that its speed is almost twice as faster than the Firefox 3.6 and rather three percent as fast as Google Chrome 5.0. However these results have been obtained on iMac OSX whereas the chrome runs faster on the Windows.
The browser now comes with a Safari Reader feature for viewing multipage articles on the Web. The reader can choose to view either single or multiple articles as per his choice; these are all now presented to him them in a new scrollable view. The safari is capable of detecting a multipage article and formats it into a single page. Quoting Apple, the company commenting on this feature has said “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”.
Again comparing Safari to Chrome, the Safari has only now introduced the support for third party extensions. Whereas Chrome had it since a year back and beta upgraded to it a year back. This was very important if Safari had to stay in competition with the functionalities of Firefox and Chrome. Like Chrome all Safari extensions are sandboxed so even if the extentions crash still the browser won’t.
Safari has once again reaffirmed its commitment to HTML with features like the HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, and HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket, and HTML5 video. All this frees us from the hassles of the flash.
Another main attraction of the new Safari 5 is the disappearance of advertisements. This however is a bad news to some of the publishers. For this the Safari 5 comes with a nice little button next to the URL that will effectively kill the ads. Not only this browser strips off the site’s branding and presents the text in nicely-formatted book-style pages.
Safari is now available for downloads and usage.