Apple Thoughts: How About Some Info on Safari 5?

"Apple's Safari browser remains an incredibly popular choice for Mac users everywhere, and is highly regarded for keeping up to date with the latest advances in web technology. Personally, I use and love it for the simplicity offered - it's fast, lean, and feels like a clutter-free window to the web."

Announced at WWDC, Safari 5 has been getting a lot of press lately, but what is all the fuss about? Well, first of all, the Reader function is new. Go to a website, click on any article so it's the only one loaded and click the "reader" button in the address bar. You can also use the "view" menu or shift-command-r to access it. As long as the web site has the standard div tags to keep the main content separate from single articles this should work on pretty much any web page. CNET has a pretty good article on how it all works in case you are curious.

Extensions are also most welcome in this edition of Safari. Think Firefox and their add ons and you'll get the idea. You can find more info about what is out there to add to your Safari browser by going to the developer page on Tumblr set up for Safari Extensions. MacLife has a good article all about extensions and what is available now, but you can also expect Apple to come out with their own info on this in the near future I'm sure. If you need some help installing them, check out this article from Mashable.

Figure 1: HTML performance speed comparison for Safari 5.

In additions, better performance when compared with the recent browsers out there, and several sites have reported on this, among them The Mac Observer with their article on Safari 5. You can see from the chart above that Safari 5 beats the performance of Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6.3 and Opera 10.53 when compared when loading HTML. They also tested JavaScript and Spider JavaScript loading speeds, and Safari took the win there as well.

They also have HTML5 support (and why wouldn't they after touting it so much in the Flash wars), search expansion to include Bing and Yahoo (wonder if Google is worried? probably not) and native support for "open last tab."

If you are curious how it's working out there, MacInTouch has some user experiences updated daily, on how Safari 5 is working for them. And of course, you can get all the info you want from Apple on their Safari site.