Apple Releases Safari 5

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Apple today released it's latest version of the Safari Browser, version 5. The most talked about features include the support for Microsoft's Bing search engine and support for HTML 5. For us the cool new feature is its new Reader. You can now view web pages in a Word document like format. It's pretty cool and it makes reading web pages a whole lot easier on the eye. So are you a Safari user and have you downloaded the latest version. Let us know your thoughts? Below is the official Apple release.

SAN FRANCISCO—June 7, 2010—Apple® today released Safari® 5, the latest version of the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4,* and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac® and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing 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 Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. 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.

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.* Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

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.

The new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions. For enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

Pricing & Availability
Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS® X and Windows as a free download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 5 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard® 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 5 can be found at www.apple.com/safari. The Safari Developer Program is free to join at developer.apple.com/programs/safari.

Browsers Being Used by iCrazee Readers

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Now that the Google Chrome dust has settled and everyone is either using the new Google Chrome for Mac or they have gone back to their choice of browser, I thought you might find it interesting to know which browsers are being used to visit my blog. I use Google Analytics and it's amazing what statistics the tool gathers for you. So here is a breakdown of  the browsers in percent that visited The iCrazee Mac Blog for the month of November 15 to December 15.

It seems most users are still using Safari, followed by Firefox and then IE. Chrome is in fourth but it's still early and this should change once Google Chrome goes from beta to a final production release build. I am quite surprised there are a number of other browsers visiting my blog like Opera built with the Presto rendering engine and Camino a Mac OS X native browser built on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. The Mozilla Compatible Agent shown on the list is most likely an unnamed browser or client application based on the Mozilla engine. At the bottom of the list is Google's web crawler called Googlebot which crawls websites to create the content for Google's search results when you search Google. I hope you have found these stats as interesting as I have.

Safari the Fastest Browser for Mac

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I have been using Google Chrome Beta for Mac the last couple of days and I was about to give the response time award to Google Chrome over Apple Safari. It just seemed a little quicker but the proof is in the pudding. ComputerWorld conducted tests using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite and Safari 4.04 is 12% quicker than Google Chrome Beta and nearly twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. You should download Google Chrome as well to try it out. Let me know how it performs on your Mac.

Google Chrome Beta for Mac

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Google released its browser Google Chrome Beta for Mac yesterday. You can download it for free from Google. I'm interested to see where their browser eventually lands up in the browser space. Most Mac users are currently using Apple's Safari browser or Mozilla's FireFox.

I downloaded Chrome today and accepted their terms and conditions. It then it asked if you would like to import your settings from Safari which I did. All my favourites were imported which was great. From my observations, Chrome Beta does not support java, the multi-touch gestures on the MacBook's trackpad or the new Magic Mouse, MobileMe syncing of bookmarks and no support for Snow Leopard's 64-bit performance. I also did not find functionality to manage my bookmarks and also there was no status bar at the bottom of the browser. I am sure they'll eventually support all the features I mentioned above but for now Google's Chrome is in Beta and their intent is for Chrome to work great with their online apps like Gmail and Google Docs, their office suite.

I'm going to give it a try for a while but I really like Safari on both my Mac as well as my IBM Thinkpad. MobileMe syncs my bookmarks on my Mac, IBM and iPhone. I really like this feature and it will be hard for me to give it up. Otherwise, good for Google and their new Chrome for Mac Beta. See the Official Google Mac Blog: Google Chrome for Mac goes beta! Let me know what browser you're using and if you intend to download Chrome.