“Apple released Safari 3.1 on March 18 with an updated rendering engine that makes the fastest Internet browser even faster,” Seth Weintraub reports for Computerworld. “On top of that, Apple’s new browser includes some features that reflect the future of the HTML 5 specification: offline storage, media support, and CSS animations and Web fonts. It also adds some needed compatibility and bug fixes, as well as some other new features that really make it a great everyday browser.”
“The interface and the user experience are largely unchanged from those in Safari 3.0. Under the hood, however, Apple has made some significant changes that it has pulled from the latest builds of the open-source WebKit engine,” Weintraub reports. “WebKit is the framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari. It is also the basis of the Web browsing engine in iPhone’s Mobile Safari, Symbian’s browser, the Google Android platform and Adobe’s new AIR platform.”
“I tested Safari 3.1 on my first-generation 2-GHz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. In MooTools’ SlickSpeed speed/validity test suite, a series of tests that use popular Javascript libraries, Safari came out on top in almost every category on both Mac and PC,” Weintraub reports.
“Apple’s Safari 3.1 allows Web sites to specify fonts outside the seven Web-safe font families; these new fonts can be downloaded by the browser as needed,” Weintraub reports.
“With the 3.1 release, Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn’t enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again,” Weintraub reports.
Full article here.
More info and download links for Apple’s Safari Web browser here.
Okay, what ARE the seven web-safe font families anyway?
My first FIRST!
Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, Tahoma, Times, Times New Roman, Verdana.
Microsoft ass-lickers* will remove Helvetica and TImes from that list and replace with Comic Sans Serif and Trebuchet.
*Such users are addled, blind, and can’t even understand ligatures, much less have the taste required to properly choose fonts.
I can confirm, Safari is snappier than Firefox.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
Microsoft plans to discontinue Explorer in the next version of the operating system.
In the future, Windows users will access the web through a high speed DOS terminal based browser based on closed-source code.
Windows users don’t need nonsense like Java and CSS animations. They just need an efficient way to download viruses and trojans to upgrade their OS with additional features.
Yeah, I’m really liking Safari 3.1 so far. A lot zippier here.
“Today I use mainly Safari because it uses CSS best and above all for the typography. Even Firefox can learn from Safari’s typography. Why is it that so few programs handle text well? Why is typography so lousy on the screen?” – World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau
Is that an endorsement or what?
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews_World_Wide_Web_co-inventor_Robert_Cailliau
I remove Arial from all my macs.
When I had Windows XP, I used Firefox. When I had Tiger, I used Firefox, but now on Leopard, I use Safari. Mainly because of Safari 3,and 3.1 now. I didn’t like Safari 2, for some reason.
I never use safari. I hated konqueror under linux, I still hate it under OS X.
Fix the crazy cookie handling in safari, getting rid of the all or nothing allowing whitelisting and I might give it a look.
Firefox is still far superior to me.
damned. I’m running it on Vista here at the office, and it is totally faster than IE. Awesome.
“Firefox is still far superior to me.”
nekogami13, don’t put yourself down like that, we all reckon you’re splendiferous.
‘Bout time someone liberated fonts. shoulda been done years ago.
Have they fixed the cache issue that exists in Safari 2 with version 3. I don’t get to have Safari 3 at work. 🙁
Dudes and Dudettes,
I have waited for this moment for several years. Safari is faster on both my Macs than is Firefox and I have officially switched to it. I even dragged the Firefox icon off my Dock. And, yes…….it went poof.
“Comic Sans Serif and Trebuchet.”
Yech.
You can double click now in the tab bar to open a new tab like in Firefox
Downloadable Fonts for web pages?! Great, another attack vector which will lead to security problems – malformed Fonts leading to remote code exploitation anyone …
I hope the Safari team have done their research on this.
@ SKY LARK
“nekogami13, don’t put yourself down like that, we all reckon you’re splendiferous.”
Hilarious! Lol!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
I kinda like the Trebuchet font. Even though it’s French
Tom, please… DON’T PANIC. Yes, there might be some as-yet-unseen exploit here. But that could be true even if all they did was update their support for good ol’ GIF images. As is it, font data is not likely to be any more problematic than any other kind of complex graphic data, such as SVG or PDF or other vector formats.
I look forward to seeing the mechanism they are using for this. It’s been tried before, but always runs aground over the issue of font copyrights. Maybe they have DRM for fonts now???
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”tongue laugh” style=”border:0;” />
So, when do we get the upgraded faster Safari for iPhone?
Or did iPhone have it first?
There’s a new preference for database storage. What’s that about?
I like Safari’s speed and the Inquisitor plugin is awesome, but I have to say I think FireFox 3 beta 4 is even faster than Safari 3.1
Its pretty close and I admit I havnt done extensive testing, but it does feel that way.
Safari beats FF on the inbuilt dictionary (Ctrl + Cmd + D), and the searching of pages too.
Safari also seems to have at last got rid of that annoying delay when first loading a page.
Just downloaded on my crappy work HP running VI$TA and this version works when the last one didn’t. I’ve been using Firefox since the first of the year but will be switching back to Safari.