Top Topic Apple : Apple's Safari 5 Browser Runs Faster, Kills Ads

pple late on Monday released Safari 5, the latest version of its browser, which includes a Safari Reader feature for viewing multipage articles on the Web.
The new browser, available for either the Mac or Windows at Apple.com/Safari, boasts a 30 percent increase in performance over Safari 4, plus the ability to select either Google, Yahoo, or Bing as the default search engine. Apple also claims that the Nitro Java engine inside of Safari 5 is three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.
The launch of Safari 5 was expected at the announcement of the iPhone 4, but Apple chief executive Steve Jobs failed to mention it in his keynote address.
"Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. "Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices."
The real innovation, however, is Safari Reader, which detects a multipage article and formats it into a single page. "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, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email," Apple said.
The biggest advantage -- or disadvantage, to publishers -- is that Safari Reader automatically strips out ads. And some graphics, for that matter. That means that while you might be able to read a multipage review without the ads, the slideshow and some associated graphics also disappear. (Viewers will likely view the first page of ads after the page loads and before the user can click on the "Reader" button.)
In the case of the ExtremeTech review linked above, the Safari Reader button only appears on the third page, eliminating all the details of the background introduction.
Safari Reader senses when a single- or multi-age article is available, and displays an innocuous-looking "Reader" button at the right end of the address bar. When clicked, the Reader abstracts the text into a semi-transparent window, which can be scrolled down or shared with other users via email.
Not surprisingly, Safari 5 aims to be HTML5 compliant, with the addition of HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket, according to Apple. An Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions, Apple said.

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