Yesterday at the yearly WWDC, Apple released the fifth major version of Safari, the popular default browser in Mac OS X. With the recent demonstrations of HTML5 as well as hard words in the direction of Adobe, Safari 5 shows Apple's truthfulness in supporting the upcoming standard.

Safari 5 comes with five major features: Safari Reader, greater HTML5 support, better performance, and Bing search. Safari Reader is an interesting new feature, it detects if you're reading articles and offers GUI tools that trigger isolation of the content, which pops-up and grays out the rest for easy reading. HTML5 support has been extended and supports full screen video (tag) with captions, location services and more. Better performance means a leaner and faster Nitro-engine that on the Mac platform at least fights off Chrome 5's V8 in SunSpider by 3%. Bing search support (is this a feature?) has been added and is, well what you expect of it (where's the management of search engines by users?). Of course there's a lot more in this release, including the return of the favored progress bar from previous Safari releases that uses the entire address bar to be blue.

However, there is just one more thing I want to get back to, Safari 5 now has a Safari Developer Program. Later this summer the Safari Extensions gallery will open up, which allows users to download Safari 5 extensions to extend the basic functionality that Apple offers. Extensions can be created with HTML5 in combination with CSS3 and JavaScript and are signed with an Apple provided signature. Safari 5 uses the sandbox principle for extensions, which should protect the user's privacy and security.

Safari 5 is available both for Windows and Mac. If you already have a Windows version installed, the Apple's Software Update application should pick it up (the shortcut is in your start menu). Mac users can get the Safari 5 update through the OS' software update (Apple logo -> Software Update...). If you don't have Safari or want the binary for your downloads folder, you can get it from Apple Safari's web site.