First, they published about it on their website. Then removed. Then later, it was finally there. Yup, Safari 5 was released yesterday and it has some improvements over the old version.
First, there’s speed. It’s noticeably faster than Safari 4.0.5 and way faster than Firefox 3.6 (not a bit deal, since SlowFox is the slowest browser out there these days). Comparing to Chrome 5.0, it feels the same. Under the hood, we have DNS prefetching and better web page caching. Most web “accelerators” already do this, and it’s nice to have these built in the browser.
Next, there’s a new feature called Safari Reader. It’s a small button on the address bar which enables a reader that removes all unnecessary garbage from the article you’re reading. Here’s a New York Times demo:
Normal web page display. When you click the new “Reader” button on the right side of the address bar, this happens:
A new overlay window opens on top of the web page, featuring the article with no images, ads, banners and other garbage. Pretty much like we have in Instapaper, but right in the browser. You can hover the mouse cursor over the reader and zoom, e-mail or print the article. Very neat!
Moving on, we have HTML5 support. Apple (and Google) spoke a lot about HTML5 in the recent past, but any keen observer would have noticed that the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview was the only “browser” that actually supported all HTML5 features so far. Second on that list? Firefox 3.6.3 – yes, the slowest browser had good support. Third, Opera 10.52. And then Safari 4.0.5 and Google Chrome 4.1. Now, Safari 5 and Google Chrome 5.0 have better HTML5 support. In Safari, 17 new features are supported. For the regular user, this won’t have much impact in the near future, but it clearly shows the direction Apple is going regarding web technologies.
Next, there are Extensions. Extensions are new ways of customizing web pages using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. I haven’t explored the internals thoroughly, but it looks like a enhanced Greasemonkey-like platform for web extensions. I have downloaded only one to test (not many out there, since the browser was released yesterday), which removes Facebook ads. And it works. Here’s how the extensions panel look like:
For now, you must manually activate this by going to the Advanced preferences pane and enabling the Develop menu. Then, enabling Extensions in that menu. Next time you open the Preferences window, you’ll see the Extensions pane. And you must manually look for and download extensions to install. In the future, I’d like to see an extensions pane like the one we have on Firefox, which is very handy and easy to use.
And last, we have now Bing search integrated into the browser. Google is still the default, but now you may choose to use the Microsoft search engine, in addition to Google and Yahoo. Steve Jobs mentioned this addition in iOS4 version of Safari yesterday, and it’s here in its desktop counterpart as well.
That’s all for major changes. There are a couple others which I find worth mentioning, which are:
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Smart Address Field: you can now type part of a web address previously visited and Safari will look in History or Bookmarks for it. Pretty much like the current Firefox and Google Chrome address bar. This was really missing in Safari 4.0.5.
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Hardware-acceleration on Windows: yes, this was missing as well. I don’t feel a sluggish experience in my quad-core, 8GB RAM PC, but other users with more modest equipment may find this very helpful.
And that’s all for Safari 5. I believe now that this and Chrome 5 are disputing toe-to-toe which is the best browser today. Microsoft seems to be doing a very good job on IE9 as well. Mozilla has a long gap to close with Firefox 4. And let’s not forget Opera, which may surprise us in the future as well.