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Apple’s Safari 5 Adds Reader, Windows Acceleration

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.

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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.

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.

Geoff Duncan
Former Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
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