233 Tech.

Safari 5: The World’s Fastest & Trendiest Browser!

Posted on 11. Jun, 2010 by Kwabena Akuamoah-Boateng in Apple FanBoy

Monday wasn’t all about iPhone 4. It was also about Safari 5, the world’s fastest and trendiest browser. Before WWDC 10, there were a lot of rumors about Apple debuting Safari 5 at WWDC. Well, Apple decided to release Safari 5 silently having posted an HTML 5 showcase on the Apple site earlier.

On starting Safari 5, users will notice that the blue loading bar is back having being substituted with the ash loading bar in Safari 4. I am used to the ash loading bar so it will take sometime to get use to the the blue bar, but I think the blue bar is cool. It helps one to know how fast a page is opening.

Users will also notice how speedy Safari 5 is. Safari 5 is the world fastest browser! In all the tests where I pitch Safari 5 against Google Chrome for Mac, Safari opened the pages faster than Safari. I was telling my brother a couple of months ago that in the browser war, there will be a new ‘the world’s fastest browser’ every two months and the competition here is between Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox. I don’t rate Internet Explorer, Camino, OmniWeb and the other browsers. I think at some point Opera will fall off.

Safari Reader is the coolest new feature for me. Reader allows you to read without distractions. Maybe Apple got the reader idea from Instapaper. The  first time I tried Reader, it felt like I was using instapaper. Reader takes away all the unnecessary ads and distractions. You can enlarge or reduce the text size in Reader. It also has email and print. In doing all this, links in the text are kept active. Reader just raise my love for Safari 10 bars up. The other browsers are definitely going to get their own Reader.

233Tech: Safari Normal

233Tech: Safari Reader

Safari 5 also has full HTML 5 support, well HTML 5 is stilling being developed so lets rephrase and say, it has the most support for HTML 5 so far among the major browsers. HTML 5 is the future of the web and just last week, Apple released a showcase of HTML 5. Indeed, Apple is committed to a HTML 5 web. A lot of bloggers and industry players have gone at Apple for being unfair to Flash. I understand Apple’s point. Anytime NewsFire or Safari crushes on my Mac, flash is to blame. Last night, when I was trying to finish up some office work, Flash did it again! I support Apple’s stance on Flash and if HTML 5 is the way, I am all for it. Anyway, I have never liked Flash. I have always hated websites with Flash. Memory hog and not good for internet made in Ghana.

Safari Extensions! It’s alright. I am not a big fan of extensions but Apple may have realised Chrome has been gaining a lot of market share with extensions. If extensions was reason enough for people to switch to Chrome, it will work with Safari 5 too. Extensions isn’t enabled yet but you can however enable it in developer mode and there are a couple of extensions out there already. I enabled Extensions and gave it a try. Like I said, I don’t like extensions but for all who like them, Safari 5 got it. Apple has promised a Safari Extensions Gallery.

A minor feature for me is that there’s the option to use Bing as the defaut search engine. Minor because I still like Google. The only thing I like about Bing is the image search. Anyway, with Glims (a plug-in that added tons of features to Safari), I always had the option of making Bing the default browser in Safari 4.

Tell your friends about Safari 5; It is the fastest web browser; It has Extensions and it has a cool new feature; Reader.

Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS and Windows

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Tags: apple, browsers, extensions, HTML5, new releases, safari, speed