The iPhone 4 may have been the highlight of Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote, but Apple also yesterday took the time to sneak out the latest version of its web browser; Safari 5.
Unsurprisingly described by Apple as the "world's fastest and most innovative web browser", Safari 5 features a number of key new features that attempt to put further distance between Apple's products and Adobe's Flash player.
At the heart of the new introductions is Safari Reader, an added feature that allows users to view and read articles without what Apple calls "annoying ads and other visual distractions".
As a feature that's certain to irk websites that rely heavily on ad-based funding, Safari Reader detects articles within a website and permits users to view every page of the relevant content "in one continuous, clutter-free view".
Extending upon its attempted move away from Flash-based animation, Safari 5 also introduces greater support for the HTML5 standard. Among the new features supported are full-screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video, HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, the HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.
Elsewhere, the addition of Safari Extensions allows developers to create browser add-ons using common standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, and Microsoft's Bing is now available as a built-in search option alongside Google and Yahoo.
Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Apple claims Safari 5 is 30 per cent quicker than its predecessor, and adds that hardware acceleration has been introduced to the Windows release.
Safari 5 is available now for Mac or Windows users at Apple.com/Safari.
