15.06.2010
Meet Safari 5
Only a few weeks after the lastest version of Google's Chrome makes its appearance, Apple have released the lastest version of Safari.
Fast, Compact
As with previous versions, Safari on Mac OS X is an undoubted winner when it comes to speed, beating Firefox 3.63, Chrome 5, and Opera 10.53.
It executes XHTML, CSS and Javascript faster than its nearest rivals Chrome and Opera, and easily beats Firefox (note however that speed tests we've seen indicate that you won't see this performance in a Windows environment).
This doesn't come at the expense of the space it will take up on your machine; in fact, at just under 57Mb, Safari 5 is over 23Mb smaller than its predecessor, and only Opera is significantly smaller at just 36Mb.
User-made Extensions & Search
One of Safari's real weak points in many people's eyes was the lack of support for third-party extensions. Safari 5 addresses that by being the first version to support user-made addons, which Apple will also start to post on its site in Summer 2010.
Hopefully this will address one major area where it has always lagged behind other browsers, which is the ability to customise your search options. Bing has now been added to the existing choices of Google and Yahoo, but not being able to change the default Google.com to a regional version like Google.co.uk is hard not to regard as an epic fail.
To balance that though, the address bar now features a 'suggest' feature that will help you locate a previously visited page again even if you can only remember part of the address.
HTML5 & CSS 3
Safari 5 supports an extra 17 HTML5 features, bringing the total to 24. So what? Well, HTML5 is big news for developers because exciting features like video playback, 'drag and drop' and geolocation - that would normally require plugins - are now incorporated.
The more browsers that can implement more of HTML5 the better - because this doesn't just mean more exciting websites, it means that the frustration (and expense) of having to worry about compatibility for things like video and audio streams in websites will hopefully be a thing of the past.
Safari 5 also scores highly in CSS3 compatibility testing, passing 576/578 checks; in fact it does pass all 578 but actually deliberately disables two of the checks because they can be used to secretly detect user behaviour on websites.
Reader
However, the most notable new feature is the 'Reader' button. This open-source technology, embraced by Apple and incorporated into Safari 5, could just revolutionalise your life if you spend more than a bit of time reading online articles.
Every time you load a blog or news page, Reader will try to strip out all the ads and navigation. If this is successful, a button will be displayed to the right of the address bar, which when clicked will dim the page and create a new layer for the article - with relevant images, quotes and highlight boxes intact.
It even aims to amalgamate multi-page articles. Text size can be adjusted, and you can convert the concise version to an email or print it. In practice it doesn't work on all sites and can take a long time even when it does. There's no control over font, line spacing or text or background colour, but it's early days yet and Apple are committed to improving the feature.
Whether or not the web's publishers who rely on ads to support their free content will be content to let this go unchallenged is another matter!
Say Goodbye to the "Loading..." icon
Apple have reversed the unwelcome change made in Safari 4 that saw the progress bar discontinued, and have reverted to this far more useful indicator.
Minimum Specs Required
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 or later, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows 7
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