The latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser brings with it the ability to choose from Google, Bing and Yahoo! as your search engine plus has Safari Extensions on board.
Like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, Safari has decided to get some plug-ins to allow users to customise their browsing experience – Safari Extensions is catered for as part of the new Safari Developer Program and will pave the way for new extensions that work with standard web technologies, including HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, and will mean that all Safari extensions now have a digital signature from Apple.
Safari 5 also brings Safari Reader: a new option of form factor for the browser specifically for reading articles – both single and multipage – on the web by displaying them in a scrollable view with no additional content.
Safari will auto-detect if an article is on screen and present an option to click on the Reader icon in the ‘smart address field’ and this also gives options to enlarge, print or send via email.
Apple claims that Safari 5 is the world’s fastest web browser and says that it has a 30pc performance increase on Safari 4 plus runs JavaScript 30pc faster than its predecessor and 3pc faster than its rival Google Chrome (Version 5.0) while apparently being more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.
Testing for JavaScript performance was carried out in May 2010 on an iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X 10.6.3, with 4GB of RAM and the JavaScript benchmark is based on the SunSpider 0.9.1 JavaScript Performance test.
“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.”
Image: Safari 5 incorporates Bing, Google and Yahoo! web browsers
