Safari 5 has shipped with HTML 5 and many new features included
It is very safe to say that Apple has leapfrogged the competition these days with some crucial, new features built into Safari 5:- HTML 5 - giving it more security, greater interoperability, offline storage/validation for forms,
- faster JavaScript (faster language, faster JSON, etc.)
- faster page fetching (prefetches DNS addresses, etc.)
- built-in developer tools for diagnosing mistakes and things that are slowing performance, etc.
- closed captioning of video for handicapped people (or those in noisy environments)
- flexibility in choice of search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo are supported out of the box
- means for developers to quickly create Safari extensions visually and a Safari Developer Support program from Apple
If the Extension Builder is good, it might have leapfrogged what Firefox currently offers. Firefox has a way that makes it possible to create powerful extensions which users just love.
Firefox does not yet have an official way to make that process easy for developers, however. They have been working on at least one for a while. But it is not clear if it will get the nod from Mozilla management and get included as a standard part of the web browser.
Performance is usually an issue in web browsers these days, especially in JavaScript based rich applications like web mail, social web 2.0 portals, and so forth. Apple made improvements in a number of areas (DNS, JSON, JavaScript, web workers) that will speed this up.
Apple is making fast implementations of existing standards, not making wildly incompatible ones and this is a nice touch on their part that is very consistent with how they operate most of the time.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, html, safari, software, web
posted by John Collins @ 5:03 PM
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