Apple Firmware Updates

With Apple’s announcement of the revolutionary iPhone 4 yesterday, it would be easy to overlook the release of Safari 5 that coincided with it. While certainly not as glamorous as Apple’s latest device, the newest version of Safari does bring some changes that will give it a serious leg up in the browser wars.

Performance is easily the biggest deciding factor when choosing a browser, and Apple has upgraded Safari with a faster “Nitro” engine to keep themselves ahead of the game. Apple claims Safari 5 will run JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0 and more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.

In addition to significant speed boosts, Safari 5 also includes the Safari Reader. This utility automatically detects if you are browsing a page with an article on it, and allows you to view it in a continuous and clutter-free manner. To enable Safari Reader, simply navigate to an applicable page and click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field. Upon doing so, onscreen controls, similar to those seen when viewing a PDF, will appear and let you email, print, and zoom. Safari Reader even saves text settings so font size is the same if you revisit the page.

Though not apparent by simply glancing at the UI, Safari 5 also includes a robust set of HTML5 tweaks under the hood. The new browser brings over a dozen new features including full-screen mode and closed captioning for HTML5 video as well as HTML5 geolocation. To view some examples of the HTML5 web standard in action, check out Apple’s showcase of demos here.

Other more subtle refinements include DNS prefetching and improved catching. DNS prefetching means that if you are viewing a web page with links, Safari detects them and looks them up behind the scenes. When you click a link, the page loads faster as a result. A web cache is essentially an index of pages previously viewed. Since Safari 5’s cache has been expanded, more pages fit into it and load faster upon being revisited.

Appending the aforementioned features are other upgrades such as a smarter address field, integrated Bing search, hardware acceleration for Windows and an improved web inspector. Safari 5 is available today, and is a free download for Mac + PC. Download it here.

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