Apple releases Safari 5 with Safari Reader, Extensions and Bing search

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Running it right now. Overall it does feel noticeably snappier to me. Scrolling is buttery smooth and the new reader is just fantastic!
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Apple has just outed a press release for Safari 5, which curiously didn't get a mention during the company's WWDC10 keynote, but should be ready to download any minute now. Safari Reader is making its debut, as we'd heard it might, alongside a claimed 30 percent performance improvement over Safari 4 and -- mirroring the iPhone 4 -- Bing as one of the preloaded search engine options. Google and Yahoo are still around, don't freak out. Apple is also adding in Extensions (think Firefox's Add-Ons) to the browser, allowing devs to use HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to pretty up the browsing experience. The Reader feature intrigues us most, as it auto-detects articles within webpages and pulls them out for an unencumbered text-only view. The idea sounds great, but we'll naturally need to see how well it works in practice. Apple's been doing a bit of benchmarking too and boasts that Safari 5 runs JavaScript a whole three percent faster than Chrome 5.0 and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Internet Explorer is presumably still working on finishing that test.

Okay, we've been playing with Safari 5 for a few moments and here's what we've noticed:

  • Reader is pretty gorgeous -- think Instapaper on the fly. It's hard to tell when it'll kick and show the Reader button in the toolbar, though -- it works on Engadget posts, but not in Wikipedia articles.
  • Yes, Netflix is broken. It seems like it's doing a browser detect and failing with the new build number, so we'd guess it'll be fixed soon.
  • It's much faster at everything from launch to rendering times. We haven't clocked it yet, but it's noticeably snappier on our quad-core i7 iMac.
  • We're dying to try out some Extensions and see how they work, but we haven't seen any yet. Same with the new HTML5 features -- hit us up if you see anything!
  • Bing Search integration is... Bing search integration. What else is there to say?
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Via Engadget.

Features Include:

- 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.
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Via Macrumors.
 
I still have to update it on my macbook, but on my windows desktop it's noticeably faster and smoother. I agree, the Reader is really nice... although I found it can be slow depending on the website.
 
Safari 5 indeed feels faster and snapier.However i still find if pretty difficult to giveup on firefox. Is it the addiction or plain fanboyism i dont know ?
 
TheBroker said:
Seems much zippier than IE.. But useless w/o extensions.. IE competition just increased..
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The new version actually comes with extensions support, you just have to enable them. Hold down your alt key to display Safari's full menu bar, then click on develop > enable extensions.

For Mac users:

  • Go to Safari preferences.
  • click advanced.
  • check the box marked Show Develop menu in menu bar.
  • click the develop menu and then click enable extensions.

There are already a handful of useful extensions available at Safari Extensions
Amaresh said:
It does feel significantly faster on OS X. I've yet to try Chromium but Safari 5 beats Firefox 3.6 hands down.
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Amen to that. Infact, Safari has always been my preferred browser on OS X, it just feels right. The UI, the responsiveness, the fact that it has much less bloat is pretty compelling.
 
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