Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing

Apple’s Safari 5 Adds Reader, Windows Acceleration

Geoff Duncan
By

Although Steve Jobs’ focus at his WWDC keynote yesterday was iPhone 4, the company has also taken the opportunity to showcase a new iteration of its Safari Web browser. Although Safari hasn’t gained much ground in the browser wars outside of Mac OS X machines—where it ships as the default browser—Apple has been developing Safari for Windows for years…and has added some special Windows-only goodies to the new release.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The showcase feature for Safari 5 so far as bneen improved support for the still-in-development HTML 5 standard, to which Apple has been in part pinning its hopes for a Flash-free Web. Safari 5 supports a full-screen mode for the HTML 5 <video> along with closed captioning, the capability to support geolocation services (where users can choose to provide location information to a Web site to find, say, local businesses), forms validation, the HTML 5 draggable attribute, and much more.

Recommended Videos

Although the HTML5 standard isn’t finalized—and Apple has been jumping into implementing technologies that are far from baked—the company certainly isn’t alone in jumping on the HTML 5 bandwagon: Internet Explorer 9, Opera, Chroma, and Firefox are all moving in the same direction. Where Apple has been drawing fire is in its showcase of HTML 5 and Web standards, which uses heavy-handed browser sniffing to lock out any browsers that aren’t Safari. Although a few of the demos illustrate technology only implemented in Safari, the majority of the demos operate just fine in other browser that have been working on HTML 5 support.

Related

Safari 5 also features a “Reader” mode that aims to declutter a Web page, pushing annoying adds and visual distractions to the background and pulling out a Web page’s primary content for easy reading. User just click a Reader icon in the address field, and Safari pulls out the primary content into a continuous, clutter-free view with onscreen controls to zoom, print, or send via email.

Apple has also juiced Safari’s performance with a faster JavaScript engine (Apple claims a 30 percent improvement over Safari 4 and twice as fast as Firefox 3.6), along with a DNS pre-fetching algorithm that looks up sites referenced in links on a loaded Web page so, if a user wants to follow that link the site’s DNS information is already cached.

Apple has also added Microsoft’s Bing as a search engine option in Safar, and added support for GPU accelleration under Windows. Safari 5 also introduces “Safari Extensions,” a way for developers to enhance and customize Safari using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to enhance Safari’s functionality.

Safari 5 will presumably become the new default browser on Macintosh systems; however, it’s free for anyone to try out. On the Mac it requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or Mac OS X 10.6.2 or newer; Windows users need Windows XP SP2, Vista, or Windows 7, although Safari’s existing Cover Flow and Top Sites features require a DirectX 9-capable video card.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Apple may have just enabled thousands of Windows games on Mac
Gaming on Apple's Macs being presented at WWDC 2023.

Apple really wants developers to port their games to Mac, going as far as to book Hideo Kojima for a cameo during WWDC 2023 and announcing the Game Porting Toolkit. However, the most significant related development didn't come during the keynote. It came afterwards, during the Platform State of the Union.

In showing off the Game Porting Toolkit, Apple detailed the process for developers wanting to port their games. It breaks down into three stages:

Read more
Microsoft Edge is losing to Safari, despite its push for AI
MacBook Air with Safari open and showing colored Compact Tabs.

Many desktop browsers continue to compete for users, and in April 2023, Apple Safari overtook Microsoft Edge in global market share, according to data collected by StatCounter.

Though the browsers' market share was still neck-and-neck, Safari's April figures come in at 11.89%, while Edge closed the month at 10.95%. Even so, both browsers continue to lag behind Google Chrome, which maintains its number one spot with in excess of 60%, as pointed out by MSpoweruser.

Read more
Apple WWDC is June 5, and the anticipated Reality Pro headset is expected
The marketing graphic for WWDC 2023.

Apple just announced its Worldwide Developers Conference, which is set for June 5, 2023, and will include a "special in-person experience" at Apple Park, where it's rumored to introduce the Reality Pro headset for the first time.

According to reliable sources, Apple will show off its advanced extended reality headset, and it's expected to set a new standard for VR and AR wearables at this event. The name will probably be Reality Pro or Reality One, based on recent trademarks. The price is reportedly $3,000, so the "Pro" moniker would be most appropriate. Of course, this is still just a rumor, so there's a chance Apple could delay the announcement until later, especially given the poor reception among employees.

Read more