Apple Safari 5 review

While all eyes were on the iPhone 4 launch this week, Apple also snuck out the latest version of its web browser. Happily it’s not a case of burying bad news: the new Safari brings some real improvements over previous versions.

Outwardly, though, Safari 5 looks identical to the previous version, and that means a few quirks still betray its cross-platform heritage. For example, the address field and forward/back buttons retain OS X style shading and borders, subtly alienating Safari from the native Windows applications that surround it. The menu bar – a non-issue on OS X – appears only when you press Alt, and there’s no way to make it stick. And preferences dialogs lack OK buttons, which is disconcerting even if you’re familiar with the OS X standard that settings take effect as soon as you click the option.

What’s new?

The big new feature is dubbed Reader, a mode that automatically extracts the main text of a web page at the press of a button and presents it in a simple e-reader-like view, with adverts and other distractions faded into the background. It doesn’t work with all websites, but it’s a nice and distinctive feature, especially since it can automatically combine text from multipage articles into one long Reader document.

If we have a complaint, it’s that you have very little control over the appearance of your Reader view. The only thing you can change is the text size, while the original open-source Readability project, upon which Reader is based, let you choose between five different presentation styles and set your own margin width. Still, it’s nice to see Apple offering a thoroughly user-centric feature such as this – it’s a fillip for the consumer, for once, against the irritations of ever more intrusive advertising.

Safari 5 is also the first version to offer an extension framework, opening the door for third parties to provide additional user-friendly features using custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This being Apple, you have to sign up for a special Developer Program to produce your own, but this is free and comes with an Extension Builder tool for packaging and signing extensions. Partnered with the debugging and optimisation tools introduced in Safari 4, it makes the platform an attractive option for developers and tinkerers alike.

That’s all that’s really new in Safari 5, but evidently Apple feels the need to make a bigger splash, so the product web page also makes a song and dance about the fact that Microsoft’s Bing engine is now available as a new search option. Perhaps that’s interesting to students of corporate politics, but the search options ought to have been fully customisable long ago.

Standards and performance

Finally, we’re told Safari 5 offers “even greater HTML 5 support” and “better performance”. The enthusiasm of the first claim seems a little transparent: Apple’s insistence on presenting HTML 5 as the sine qua non of rich web content is clearly a strategic position against Flash, rather than a realistic reflection of what’s out there. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with supporting the new standard – on the contrary, it’s good that someone’s getting the ball rolling – but we very much doubt you’ll see any benefit from it during the lifetime of this browser, especially since, unlike Apple’s mobile efforts, Safari 5 is fully compatible with Flash.

What’s more, according to the independent test at http://html5test.com, Safari 5’s HTML 5 implementation is no more complete than the previous version’s, with both scoring 207 out of 300. Still, it’s ahead of Chrome 5 on 197 and well in the lead over Firefox 3.6.3 on 139, Opera 10.53 on 129 and Internet Explorer 8 on a pathetic 27.

Safari 5 also scored 100% on the Acid3 CSS test, but that’s not so remarkable: Safari 4 managed the same, as did Chrome and Opera, while Firefox lagged just a little with 94%. The only disaster was IE, which scored just 12%.

On the performance side, one big improvement in Safari 5 is the use of DirectX 9 hardware acceleration for the glitzy “Top Sites” interface and the graphical History view. Now, even with entry-level hardware, they feel snappy and slick. That goes a long way to alleviate the “bolted on” sense that we felt lingered around Safari 4.

It’s responsive in everyday use, too, as we expect of all modern browsers. Pages appear quickly, and when you resize the window the text and graphics reflow instantly. Improved caching of DNS and content should help followed pages appear more quickly too, whether you’re browsing forwards or back.

To get an idea of performance in rich web applications, we compared all five major browsers using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Here Safari 5 completed the SunSpider tests in just 324 milliseconds, a minimal improvement over the 336 seconds taken by Safari 4 on the same hardware. Chrome, though, came in with an even faster time, of just 292ms, and Opera undercut them both at 277ms. Runners-up were Firefox, on 710ms, and IE with an embarrassing 3.9 seconds.

Like the concurrently launched iPhone 4, Safari 5 is an evolution rather than a departure. There are some neat features here, but nothing that’s going to change the game. Likewise, performance and standards support are slightly improved, but not dramatically so.

Yet it feels fast and solid, and it’s no quirkier than the likes of Chrome or Opera. Couple that with the gradual normalisation of the front-end, and for the first time you’re left with an Apple-branded product that’s starting to feel genuinely at home on Windows. There’s still work to be done, but Safari 5 feels like it’s ready for the big time.

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