Safari 5: What's New?

On Monday, Apple brought Christmas to geeks early this year by announcing the iPhone 4. However, we got a small present a few hours after the WWDC 2010 Keynote when Apple officially announced the 5th version of their Safari browser. Now, if you are an avid Safari user, you should definitely upgrade to the latest version. If you have drifted away from Safari, this update is definitely worth the time to try out.

One of the first things I noticed about Safari 5 is that is much more snappy than the previous version. Another thumbs up for a lot of people is that it brings back the loading bar rather than having that grey load progress indicator in the corner of the address bar. On top of that, Bookmarks and Top Sites work so much more smoothly than they did in Safari 4. For those of you that are developers out there, you will probably enjoy that HTML5 and CSS3 support has dramatically gotten better since Safari 4 with new features such as Geolocation and AJAX History. Another big leap is finally allowing extensions! Developers can join now the new Safari Developer Program for absolutely free and start making some awesome extensions.

One of the newest features in Safari 5 that makes it “smarter” is Safari Reader. Whenever your on a web page trying to read a blog post or an article, Safari 5 will automatically detect an article on the page. If it picks it up, you can click the Safari Reader icon in the address bar and a PDF-like window will pop out which will cut out the rest of the page and just focus on the article. In this window, you can zoom in and out, email, and print what is shown. This is a really nifty feature on a website with tons of ads.

Another few minor features is the support for a Bing search in the Search Bar. Previously, you were only allowed Google and Yahoo. There is also a smarter address field which has dramatically better results than any of the previous versions of Safari. Also, for those of you on Windows, Safari 5 has Hardware Acceleration if you want to see what your graphics card can really do. Overall, this is a pretty nice update for Safari and is a nice improvement over Safari 4. It is fast, but from what I can see, it is still not as fast as Chrome. It is getting very close to it, but it is not there yet.

What do you think about Safari 5? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments.