Yesterday was the day of the Apple releases. iPhone 4 was first, as it was expected, but it wasn’t the only product that Steve Jobs talked about. The browser with the lowest market share also got a new version that offers some new things.
Here are the most important new features of the Safari 5
Safari Reader – rearranges the pages eliminating ads and other elements that have nothing to do with that specific page. In the end, the site will look like a page from a book and the article will be easier to read.
HTML 5 – the new Safari version comes with improved support for the HTML 5 web standard. Among the recognized features we mention geolocation and full screen rendering of video files.
Speed – Apple still claims that they have the fastest browser, although the tests say otherwise. The new version, according to the same people over at Apple, proved to be as “honest” as they were until know, should be even faster. To be more precise, it should be 3% faster than Google Chrome. Further more, Safari 5 knows how to do DNS prefetching, feature that Chrome has it integrated even since the first versions.
Bing Search – Since Apple and Google are no longer in good terms, Steve thought that they might hit Google if they choose Bing as a search engine. Knowing the market share of Safari, the people over at Google will probably cry for about 1 second.
Extensions – Apple has given the start to extension development. For the moment there are no extensions, however they will appear by the end of the summer.
Other new features in Safari 5:
- address bar will automatically complete the entered text, now searching in Bookmarks and also in History.
- tabs instead of Windows, finally, the pages that should open in a new window now they will be open in tabs.
- hardware acceleration – available only for Windows, this feature will help in making the multimedia content run more faster.
- Web Inspector - feature used by web developers has received a few improvements, among them we mention the increase of loading HTML code and executing JavaScript scripts.
