Apple just launched Safari 5.0 about few hours ago after the WWDC keynote by Steve Jobs. Its a surprised that Steve Jobs did not mention it during the keynote – guess IPhone 4 is a lot more exciting that Safari 5.0.

Apple claims that Safari is fast, faster than Chrome in-fact. Here’s what has been claimed:

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.

In addition to that – Safari 5.0 also includes DNS Pre-fetching – which what I understand, perform a Domain Lookup (which can be quite slow sometimes) while you reading the page, prior before you pressing the link. This is somewhat smart – especially if your DNS Server is slow. I hope my understanding is right! This is what Apple actually says:

Behind the scenes, Safari employs a technique called Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching. If you’re on a web page with links, Safari finds the links and looks up the addresses. Click one of the links, and Safari quickly loads the web page for you. And improved page caching means more of the pages you viewed in the past load faster than before.

In general – the performance comparison chart for Safari is as follows:

All the charts make it look very – nice, but more importantly is the feel of non-clunkiness during the usage is more important. To me – the of the Clunky Rating, i do find Safari 4 quite bad (not as bad as Internet Explorer though).

Again – this is pretty much testing on Windows 7. Its not really that bad on Snow Leopard – but we shall see.

The more fun part of Safari is actually Safari Reader. This is really exciting! Safari Reader is a feature that allows user to view just the article, removing all the annoying advertisement. Just you and the article. The fonts are much bigger too allowing those with bad eyesight to be able to read comfortably.

Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article — whether two or twenty. Onscreen controls let you email, print, and zoom. Change the size of the text, and Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader.

What I am trying to understand is what are the sites which supports this Reader Functionality.

I will update this blog posting once I find more about what and how the Reader works – but I must say this particular functionality is a boon for casual readers like me and a nightmare for those going for the ads. I bet you in the coming weeks – a script will come out such a way that you will see advertisement in the Reader view.

When you go to supported websites, you will see:

See the Reader button on the right?

When you click that button you will get this:

As you can see – the website itself will be darkened – putting the focus straight on the article itself. No more annoying ads I must say! You will also get the + and – button to increase and decrease the font size. You can email the article (woo hoo), and the best is to be able to print. The printout is free of clutter (woo hooo again).

What I do not understand at this point of time – is what kind of sites do you get the Reader button! It seems that based on my observation, the sites which has one article (like viewing an article within a blog), you can have the Reader button, and not when you viewing a list of articles. It will be great if they can have a next-back button to browse thru the articles. Anyway – it didn’t work on my blog, so gotta do more research on how to enable this functionality!

He he – in summary, Safari 5.0 is great but whether its as good as Chrome, yet to be determined. We shall see soon!

 

UPDATE

It seems that it automatically detects the article within a particular posting. My article of Safari seems to work and the i can see the Reader button!