Apple thinks Safari 5 is the best way to read online, greater support for HTML5, and other new features that make the web even better, I could agree with them after I cruised through my favorite websites on the new Safari 5 Read on.
Apple has packed quite a number of new features and improvised old ones from its predecessor Safari 4. This makes Safari 5 a browser that will give tough competition for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.
Apple released Safari 5 on June 7, 2010 & it’s available for both MAC & Windows Operating system. There is a trimmed down version of the browser which comes preinstalled for the iPhone & iPad and that is Apple’s strategy to be far more reaching across various platforms.
First thing you will notice about Safari 5 is the simple user interface that it carries throughout. There are no cluttered icons or tabs, when you open a website you will be focusing on the contents of the webpage rather than getting distracted with useless functions which a normal user would rarely use on the browser, it’s simplicity that Apple has aimed for and have gotten it.
Apart from the user interface is Apple’s engineering brilliance pushed to limits on making Safari one of the fastest browsers on the planet. Apple claims that Safari5 is faster than Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox, while this might be an exaggeration with no unnecessary plugins & add-ons installed, the pages load surprisingly fast & we found the browser to be satisfactory overall in our tests.
Apple has made some much required changes under the hood of the browser. The browser now supports dozens of new web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, & JavaScript, Also new to the browser are full screen play back and closed captions for HTML5 Video, HTML5 Geo-location, HTML5 forms validation, & several other features.
When you visit a website & see a lot of text content it’s easy to get distracted with all those pictures, ads, menus, user comments, and other rich multimedia. This adds to a lot of clutter which the user usually ignores and oftentimes distracting. Apple introduces a new feature called “Safari Reader” which basically pops up a clean user interface with only the main content eliminating all the clutter for us to enjoy reading, this feature is yet to be seen in any browser till date. For those of us who love reading articles & blogs online this is a change that we have been waiting for. To open the reader simply click on the reader icon within the address bar, you will have access to some handy functions like zoom in zoom out, Mail page & print.
An important feature in any browser is the ability to search without opening the webpage, this feature has been a standard feature in Safari. Now, new to Safari5 is the ability to choose your search engine from the likes of Google, Yahoo & Bing from the search bar. The default search remains to be Google which should satisfy most of the customers. This has been a long awaited change that safari users want as other browsers provide this function from a long time.
Safari5 also introduces a new feature called “Smart Address Bar”, now we do need to type the full web address in order to visit a page, for example if u want to visit www.apple.com, simply type apple & hit enter. Also as you visit more web pages the smart address bar gets smarter suggesting you the page that you want to visit based on the history of your browsing. It’s definitely a time saver.
Apple has done a great job with the Safari5; this update might save the browser market share for Apple. We think Apple is already overdue on these new features as most of other browsers have already implemented them with the exception of the Safari Reader. The Safari Reader might just be the feature that will make people switch to the new browser. What do u think? Did Apple do a great job with Safari5 or is it just on par with the other browsers out there with this update? Leave us a comment here.
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