Safari 5 is a web browser made by Apple for the Mac. It is a lightweight and robust solution for every Mac user.
This new version is no different. The first thing you will notice is that the user interface is very clean and intuitive. There are no toolbars at sight, but you can add a bookmark bar, if you want to. Although Safari is not known to be the most secure web browser for Mac, it has some nice features to avoid the most common attacks from websites and users. Privacy is also well taken care of.
Apple is a supporter of HTML 5, so it is no wonder that Safari is among the leaders for innovation and support of the standard. It now supports several features for development and playback of HTML5 content, including HD and full-screen videos. Javascript also plays faster than in other web browsers according to Apple.
There are a few new features with this release of Safari. The most innovative one in my opinion is "Reader". This feature allows you to block out ads and other elements in a website to give priority to what you are reading. When Safari detects that you are reading an article (I don't know how it does this), it will enable Reader mode. If you activate it, the application will pop-up the text and images of the article and block the rest, so you have no distractions.
A feature that I personally like is Safari's top sites screen. It allows you to save your most visited sites on a central screen from where you can access them all. It might be just a little slow at times, but it looks awesome. And Safari was the first web browser to natively implement it.
Pros
- It is fast, smart and robust
- Many features
- Top sites is great
Cons
- The only problem I have with Safari is that it won't fill the whole screen, not even when holding Shift
Piece of crap website.some of us poor folk are stuck with old ancient broken macs,i want to download old software but this site keeps linking back to Apples latest versions! which do not work or install on very old imacs : (
In general, Safari is not that bad: it works and works fast. Whereas my Chrome copy keeps crashing each time I enter the iTunes page on the Apple's site, Safari copes with this task without any noticeable effort. Its memory use is also quite modest in comparison with Friefox or Chrome, again. On the other hand, this browser is much more unstable than its competitors and utters cries of pain under a hard-start (i.e. with several dozens of tabs opened at once). And its biggest shortcoming is, surely, its design: Who needs the 'Open in a New Window' option by default? It's totally unhandy. The overall design can also be characterised with one word: poor.
Does anybody know when the 6th version will be available?