Major update to Safari for Windows

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 19 December 2007 03:53

Business IT - Technology

A new beta version of Apple's Safari browser for Windows delivers a laundry list of new features and other changes.

Apart from the customary performance and stability improvements and the security fixes delivered to the Mac version of Safari by Apple's Security Update 2007-009.

Some of the new features are concerned with making Safari fit in better with the Windows environment. These include allowing windows to be resized from any side, support for NTLM authentication, tooltips, the use of proxies specified in the Internet control panel, PAC file auto-dtection, and tilt-wheel support. More than a dozen keyboard shortcuts have been added, including Control-Tab and Control-Shift-Tab for navigating between tabs.

Safari 3 beta 3.0.4 also provides an additional font smoothing option suited to CRT displays, though some users would like to be able to turn off font smoothing completely.

Other text-related changes include support for International text input methods, contextual forms and international scripts, and the provision of spelling and grammar checking. AutoFill information can now be edited.

Bookmark and cookie management have been improved, and the full text of visited pages is considered when doing a History search.

Apple also claims improvements to standards compliance and site compatibility, including support for LiveConnect which allows communication between Java and JavaScript elements on a web page.
  
Safari beta 3.0.4 for Windows can be downloaded using the Apple Software Update utility if an earlier version is already installed, or directly from Apple's web site.