Apple releases Safari 5

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 09 June 2010 06:29

Business IT - Technology

The latest version of Apple's Web browser adds a feature for making Web pages easier to read, performance enhancements, extensions, and more.

The most immediately noticeable new feature is Safari Reader, which generates a simplified view of any Web page that contains a primary article. The simplified view is black text on a white background and slides up over the originating Web page -- you call it up by clicking the "Reader" button in the address bar.

The new sheet also displays icons for zooming in and out and printing or e-mailing the simplified view. The e-mailing feature didn't work for this writer, though -- it popped up a message saying it couldn't find an e-mail program, even though my default reader is Apple's own Mail.

It's a very nice feature to have built-in, though the third-party add-on Readability already does much the same thing and offers more customization options.

As for performance, Apple claims that improvements to the Nitro JavaScript engine make Safari run JavaScript "30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6."

Safari 5 also implements DNS prefetching, by which it looks up the addresses for all the links on a Web page before you click on them, which eliminates that small delay when you click on one. Apple also claims to have improved page caching for faster loading of already visited pages.

For more new features, see Page 2.