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Apple releases Safari 5
LITTLE SOFTWARE HOUSE Apple has released Safari 5, the latest version of its web browser.
Jobs' Mob crows that it is the "world's fastest" because it is three per cent faster than Chrome 5 and 30 per cent faster than Safari 4.
Apple also says it is the most innovative so it must be. Along with "cool" and other words that the cappuccino company likes to use to create the impression that it's hip and with it.
The web browser comes with a "Safari Reader" function that detects if you are reading an article on the web and presents it in a scrollable view without any additional content or clutter.
It supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that do not include the banished Flash.
The HTML5 features listed include full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video, as well as HTML5 geolocation, sectioning elements, draggable attributes, forms validation, Ruby, Ajax history, eventsource and websocket.
Safari 5 runs on the Nitro Javascript engine. Apple claims it is twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. We wonder why it did not mention that it would be way faster than Internet Exploder, too.
Anyway the web browser speeds were all tested by Apple on a Mac so they must be right.
Safari 5 loads webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly. This is similar to Chrome. µ
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Discuss.
What would speed up a web browser more than simple optimization? Blocking ads. What would reduce load times and bandwidth usage noticeably? Blocking ads. What would stop infections from compromised banner networks? Blocking ads. I could go on. Safari would definitely become "the world's fastest" and much more "cool" if it did this.
I sooo wish there's firebug extension for safari, fully featured like on FF. FF is so slow on mac, safari very fast as is chrome but none of them has firebug, there's firebug lite though but it's not as good as proper extension for FF. I've got a bad feeling that lack of firebug on safari/chrome is webkit related
Peacekeeper on XP, average from two runs:
Firefox 3.6 - 2,896
Safari 5 - 4,132
Chrome 5 - 6,893
I dare say someone will be along to pooh-pooh the Futuremark benchmark but still - I'd love to see Apple's "working out" for this one.
Browser competition is good. It keeps them all on their toes with constant improvement and innovation. I personally use Firefox 90%, Safari 10% of the time, and I'd rather get punched in the nuts than be stuck using Internet Explorer. Chrome, meh, I've tried it, don't really have an opinion on it.
But having FOUR different browsers that are being actively developed and competing against each other brings immense benefits to the consumer. Without the fierce competition from Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, we'd all still be using that miserable piece of crap known as IE6.
I just tested Safari 5 on Windows and it is definitely slower than both Chrome and Firefox. Maybe it is just that the other browsers are slow on Apple computers?
Furthermore, one of my own JS-heavy websites (which works fine even on IE6) simply refused to work. Thankfully, there are no tech-savvy Safari/Apple users, so I don't have to start researching what exactly happens with Safari...
But I want my browser to block ads and not fall over, and that's pretty much it. Frankly I could care less if it's fractionally faster/slower than Chrome or Firefox etc. when modern PCs make even the most poorly coded application look fast. Even iTunes! Okay, not iTunes. You'd need a processor to plop through a wormhole from the 25th century to make that pregnant whale look anything but slow-witted.
Plus, it's a good job browsers are traditionally free utilities. Were Apple and other developers to charge money for them, you just know Safari would be reassuringly expensive alongside the competition, despite it performing the exact same tasks and showing pages the exact same way - just inside an Apple-flavoured wrapper.
Probably £99? Plus £39.95 for the 'HTML5 browsing pack'? The zombies would gladly pay for that sort of nonsense.