Apple's new Safari 3.1 browser 'the fastest'... but for how long?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 19:32

Opinion and Analysis

Apple’s PR spin breathtakingly informs us that: “The incredible performance of Safari, combined with its elegant user interface, lets users spend more time surfing the web and less time waiting for pages to load.”

Continuing, Apple says that “Safari features an intuitive browsing experience with drag-and-drop bookmarks, easy-to-organise tabs, an integrated Find that shows the number of matches in a page and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information”, although these aren’t exactly unique features.

However Apple is also claiming some firsts, likely also to be matched once some of the other browsers in beta finally get released. Apple says that: “Safari 3.1 is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts, giving designers limitless choices of fonts to create stunning new web sites.”

After having downloaded the latest Safari, which is a free download as you’d expect, my own quick, informal tests show that it is quite fast, quickly loading pages, bringing up graphics and text before Firefox 3 beta 4, but both coming close when the page actually finishes loading, with each ‘winning’ depending on which sites were being loaded.

So, you can expect plenty more detailed tests from around the web over the coming days, weeks and months, with more claims of ‘the world’s fastest browser’ undoubtedly set to come from each of the main browser makers, as the war over who’s the speediest at rendering the web flies into warp speed!