Although it was overshadowed by the release of iPhone 4, Apple released version 5 of its Safari browser on Monday. The new version features a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, and a new Reader that allows a user to read multiple-page articles on the web — without ads.
As with previous versions, the newest Safari incarnation is available for Mac and Windows. It features support for a dozen new HTML5 technologies, including full-screen playback and closed captioning for video, geolocation, sectioning elements, a draggable attribute, forms validation, Ruby, AJAX history, EventSource and WebSocket. WebSocket is a still-being-standardized open protocol for bidirectional, full-duplex communications.
Extension Builder
Safari extensions can be created by developers for enhanced browsing, and the extensions can utilize HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Safari 5 offers a new Extension Builder, which Apple said helps to simplify the development and installation of extensions. The company also noted that, for security reasons, the extensions are sandboxed, require a signed digital certificate, and run only in the browser.
In addition to running JavaScript 30 percent faster than its predecessor, Apple said Safari 5’s JavaScript performance is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6 — but only slightly faster than Google’s Chrome 5.0. In addition, web pages are loaded faster because of Domain Name System (DNS) pre-fetching.
Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller said Safari currently runs on “over 200 million devices worldwide,” and the open-source WebKit engine on which it is based — and which powers other browsers, including Google’s Chrome — is present on more than 500 million devices.
The Reader function is attracting attention because it allows a user to read content without being bothered by ads. When the browser detects an article, the Reader option in the Smart Address Field can be selected to show the content in…