We’re a little late with this one, but hey, I have to sleep too. In the middle of last night, Apple released version 5 of its Safari web browser for both Mac OS X and Windows, and it contains some very interesting improvements, including an extensions framework.
Of course, like every other browser maker, Apple touts the performance horn. They’ve updated the Nitro JavaScript rendering engine, which is now 30% faster than the one in Safari 4, 3% faster than the one in Chrome 5.0, and twice as fast as the one used by Firefox. Support for various HTML5 APIs has been added as well.
Apple also implemented DNS prefetching, a technology pioneered by Google; it’s been in Chrome since its launch in September 2008 (try navigating to about:dns). Basically, this technology scans the links on web pages, pre-resolving the IP addresses of the various domains associated with the content behind that link. It does all this in the background.
Just as the iOS 4 adds Microsoft’s Bing as an option for the search field, Safari 5 gets the bing treatment as well. Like on iOS 4, the default is still Google, but in addition to Yahoo! you can opt to search with Bing as well. Speaking of Microsoft, Safari 5 also adds hardware acceleration on Windows.
Also new, and much-anticipated I’m sure, is the extension system. Firefox popularised the concept, and Chrome followed in its footsteps, so Safari couldn’t stay behind for long. Extensions can be written in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and will be sandboxed and cryptographically signed by Apple. You have to enrol into the free Safari Developer Program to develop extensions, although Ars notes that you don’t need to go through Apple’s official channels to distribute them.
That’s the catch-up stuff, now let’s look at the big new feature. Safari Reader kind of does what its name implies: it removes all clutter from web pages, displaying only the story. It removes ads and sidebars, stitches pages together when articles are spread out, and presents it all in a printable layout. The ads and various web pages are still fully downloaded, so web sites will still see the correct amount of page views and ad impressions.
Safari 5 is available for Mac OS X and Windows.
Won’t it be incorrect since some ads will be downloaded, but not displayed?
Page owner will like it, ad companies not so much.
But yeah, I agree.
But this way page owners won’t try to bypass it ..
“The ads and various web pages are still fully downloaded, so web sites will still see the correct amount of page views and ad impressions.”
If the ads aren’t shown, won’t the web site see _too many_ ad impressions then?
Yes, to many and less clicks. Some sites which mostly have visitors like this will get different ratios now and less money and less ads from ad-providers I guess.
The page is shown fully and you have to click “Reader” in the URL bar, much like RSS; where upon it displays the Reader view. So you have to view all the ads first before you can mask them (Reader displays over a translucent black background so the original page is visible behind).
It only seems to support specific sites (NYT / BBC &c.) unlike Readability which makes a stab at most pages, so it’s not much of a feature.
If it works on NYT for you, you’re having better luck than I am. No matter what article I click, no matter what section, I can’t enable reader at all. It remains resolutely grayed out.
Works just fine and I’m running it on a Powerbook to test with Leopard 10.5.8.
I haven’t got my hands on it yet (can’t restart atm), so I’m wondering how it works. Does it try to guess which div has the content (unlikely since you say it works on specific sites only)? Does it use -webkit-display-this-on-the-reader-thingy or something like that? Does it use the html5 article tag?
Um, it’s working just fine on OSnews. Try your own GeOS article.
Thanks for the Readability tip!
Great now I can finally see the HTML 5 showcase page *kuch*. A good thing is that addons have to be signed, I would like Firefox required that too and prefatching is nice too.
But for the rest I won’t gonna use it, because I don’t like Apple as company
cryptographically signed by Apple.
you don’t need to go through Apple’s official channels to distribute them.
clearly, if apple sign the extensions themselves it does not matter if you can distribute them yourself or not, they still make the choice and control, apple store style.
Probably need more precisions here
It might be my computer (Macbook 4,1 from 2008) but the performance doesn’t really seem any different. As for the reader, which seemed like an awesome feature, on my system it’s been disabled ever since I installed Safari 5. I can’t enable it on any web page I’ve tried visiting, it’s been grayed out the entire time. So, what looked like the most awesome feature of Safari 5 to me I can’t even turn on. Wonderful.
Upon further inspection, even the help topic for reader is unavailable, help viewer claims it doesn’t exist. Is anyone else experiencing this? Do I need to reinstall Safari 5 or is this really as buggy as I’m seeing?
edit: typo.
Edited 2010-06-08 10:27 UTC
Doesn’t work for every news site.
Try this (works for me):
1. go to http://news.bbc.co.uk
2. click on a random article
3. wait until it’s fully loaded
4. a reader icon should appear in the adress bar (at the position of the RSS icon) afterwards
5. click on it
6. voila
On sites where it works, it’s a very nice feature.
btw: it’s only available on Mac OS X 10.5 or newer
Edited 2010-06-08 12:38 UTC
Ok, that sort of worked. It only worked on one article for me (the one concerning the supposedly kidnapped Iranian scientist). Didn’t work on the others though. Certainly would be a nice feature, but the fact that it works so very rarely makes it all but useless. Seriously, what’s the point?
There’s something wrong…the Reader works great for me on all type of news sites, any site I’ve tried with articles.
i really like the reader and it worked right away on all news sites i frequent.
The reader is Safari’s answer to lynx? Or did I misunderstand what it does?
Edited 2010-06-08 12:11 UTC
It’s quite annoying that it doesn’t remember the zoom level when you visit a site for a second time.
Maybe Safari 6 will get a new kill-feature: Better browsing experience with less ads through Flash dispensation.
I’m I the only one annoyed that Safari for Windows is 50MB download that is bundled with Quicktime and Bonjour? What total crap. We’ll ignore the fact that the UI was almost entirely ripped from Chrome, except for tab placement (Which they tried, and failed miserably at, and fixed it before Safari 4 went final).
It’s a big download with QT. But, on the download page you can choose one of two Windows Safari versions for download – one with Quicktime and one without (saves about 20MB). Bonjour is coming in either one, although you can choose to not have that bothersome app installed during setup.
Regarding Safari ripping off Chrome’s UI… Safari was released 5 years before the first beta of Chrome (back in 2003 on Panther) and overall UI design for Safari hasn’t changed significantly since then (just tweaks).
Take a look at a screenshot of safari 3, then safari 4, on windows. Safari 4 came well after chrome, and it shows.
Also, when I downloaded Safari last night, having it bundled with QuickTime was the only option available. The standalone download was added some time today, so that, at least, has been corrected
Well, at one point all the apple for windows apps used the quicktime library for the GUI as well as the multimedia. So that explains quicktime. Bonjour is just stupid. 99.99% of people installing Safari for Windows will never use it.
Is there any reason to install Bonjour on Windows? I have never heard of anyone using it.
I guess if you are in a Apple/Mac environment they would be using it. But shouldn’t Bonjour be separated?
There are supposedly a number of printers that are using ZeroConf/Bonjour, but whether you need to install it or not, that’s another matter. Is it part of Windows 7?
is why did’t they build it on GNUStep to work on more platforms and reuse their experience in ObjC. Just wondering.
Because they do not see any potential for income in doing so. They do not care.
Also GNUStep is not keeping pace with Apple’s APIs and that would make for more work, again with little to be gained by Apple.
I’m really glad that Click2Flash still works in Safari 5. I thought it might have gotten broken but no.
Personally I hope that as many ads as possible stick with Flash so that I can block them.
Why do I block them? Animation. If they took animation out of their ads I wouldn’t block them with anything I can find. Just being honest.
As for the Reader only working on some articles. The articles have to be Long enough for it to be available.
…for Windows.
31 MB for me. But I already have iTunes/Quicktime installed.
I am guessing it will still be somewhat ugly on Windows with irritating font rendering.
Still, it will be fun to try it out.
Huh. The fonts are not rendering as badly as I remembered.
I’ve been playing with it since yesterday but Chrome is still quite a bit faster.
I am using a Powermac G4, but it runs even faster. So far, it’s great, and I can’t wait to see what Extensions start getting pulled together.
And a sneak edit: Here is the blog for extensions that are coming out like running water.
http://safariextensions.tumblr.com/
Edited 2010-06-08 20:58 UTC
I can’t believe all you guys do is bitch about UI originality, and the pretty useless Reader feature, when this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/safari_history_leak_fix/ seems much more newsworthy.
Edited 2010-06-08 22:00 UTC
I think it simply appear on webpage with print view. It even works on a korean portal site. And seems its content is identical to of the print view on the same page.