Apple Safari 5: Faster, HTML 5 Friendly

Apple has launched Safari 5 for Mac and Windows users. Apple claims that Safari 5 is 30 percent faster than Safari 4 and has improved developers tools which support many new HTML5 technologies. Developers can also create secure Safari Extensions to customize web experience.

“Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices.”

Safari 5 also optimized for better reading experience. Users can scroll and read multiple articles in an easier way. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear.

Apple is claiming that Safari 5 is 30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Safari 5 uses Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching to load pages faster.

Apple’s press release explains how Safari 5 is better for developers. Apple says Safari 5 adds more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

In terms of security and stablility, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

Click here to download Safari 5