Apple debuts Safari 5 for Mac and Windows

Apple has released Safari 5 for both Mac and Windows. There was no mention of the Apple's latest web browser this morning at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, but the company did spit out a press release in tandem with its release detailing the iPhone 4, due on June 24; iOS 4 (née iPhone OS 4.0), due …

[SilverWave]

Safari Reader FTW! (Readability Knockoff?)

Fantastic - no more need for greasemonkey scripts to clean-up fugly sites!

*cough* thereg *cough*

I had just loaded up the Readability add-on for firefox and it does do an OK job.

Of course now that Apple have built this in, Mozilla will fall over them selves to out do them :-)

I just <3 browser competition, it keeps everyone on their toes.

Mind you I wonder what Advertisers will make of this... heh, is that screaming I hear?

[windywoo]

El Reg can be used in the reader.

Quite handy I suppose if you don't want to strain your eyes.

[Pete 48]

And yet...

They still havent fixed the folder redirection loss or settings problem.

[Alastair 7]

Wow

Apple-approved browser add-ons too now, huh? I'm guessing we won't see an iAd blocker any time soon...

[Sir Alien]

Anticompetitive

Fortunately apple will have to make it all or nothing blocking or they will be in a world of hurt with competition laws in most countries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

It's Apple-certificated extension developers - you need to code sign your extensions so that people know they are coming from you, can't be tampered with and so that there is a paper trail for Apple should you turn out to be a nefarious type trying to sideload malware into their browser. Let me know what exactly is wrong with that once you get your head from out of your behind.

[Sir Alien]

Target?

If this was targeted at me maybe I am explaining it incorrectly.

What I mean was if Apple allow plugins that block other ads but don't allow them to block iAds then that would be anticompetitive. If they allow adblocker plugins then they would have to let it block all ads not just non-apple ads.

[James O'Shea]

wrong target

I suspect that it was aimed at the laddie to which you were replying.

[Fred Flintstone]

Well, umm..

.. I vaguely remember that approach with Microsoft approved drivers and signatures. Didn't go anywhere proper either..

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always Glimmerblocker

Free browser-independant ad blocking http://glimmerblocker.org/

[Adrian 10]

Reg view on ad blocker???

> You might call it a de facto ad blocker.

No ads seems good to me, at least at first. However, take The Register - if we can't read your ads, then you can't get money, then you have to all go out & get other jobs and I no longer get your articles. Then I would no longer have the information I need to do my job... I paint a bleak picture to illustrate (or exagerate) a point.

After some time with my bleak thought - I now think this feature could be a bad thing. The alternative though..... you would have to charge a subscription to readers. Hrmmm... don't Apple have a plan along those lines, controlling media access and getting a cut of the money from everyone reading content.

This first seemed like a quick point to skim over, but I don't think it actually is. I'd be really interested to see a Reg staff member post a response on the forum where it can be more of a personal opinion than you can provide in a professional article. Do you think this will affect your business model? If so, should you (and therefore us long time readers also) be concerned?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duhh. I'm stoopid!

You do know that ad blockers have existed for many, many years now, don't you? How does this make any diffrence to them now, when sane people have been blocking ads for the past 5+ years already.

Fwiw, in contrast to say AdBlock for Firefox, this method has the benefit for the site owner of making people load a page (with all its Ads) first, before they can be blocked. If it takes off in Safari and other browsers, perhaps the only thing it will change is the hideous practice of some sites of splitting articles across multiple pages, which would be a huge win for the user.

[RJ]

Advertisers are goign to hit the roof!

An extension that blocks out the original site? Overlays only the relevant information?

Ye gods, anyone on a CPM payment system is gonna get hammered by that. I wonder if there is a way to stop the browser doing it (or they just ban Safari 5...)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad...

Wow, under linux/ wine, it installs without problems and is relatively stable - providing you don't open new tabs... Firebloat, look out..

[Pavlovs well trained dog]

Proxy

But does it work with proxies yet?

[ThomH]

Under Windows or OS X?

Under OS X, using a proxy for HTTP is a systemwide decision (correctly, I think), so you can set a proxy through the System Preferences. I can't help you with Windows, I'm afraid...

[Fred Flintstone]

OK, I'm baffled

What I like about the Mac is that it can go long times before it needs a reboot, but what baffles me is that it too sometimes wants a reboot for, well, weird reasons.

I had a reboot "diktat" when installing a Logitech Blackfield mouse (the Apple mice just don't work for me - too low), and this Safari update wants one too. I'm glad it's not every other hour as (still) with Windows but Safari must be grabbing the OS pretty deep if this needs a restart..

Enfin, I'll take it for a spin. Let's see what it's like..

[PC1512]

Webkit

As I understand it, although the Safari app itself isn't part of the Mac OS foundations (in the same way that IE is to Windows), the Webkit web rendering engine is, and updates to that generally come bundled with updates to Safari.

For the most part reboots are rare in Mac OS as the OS has the ability to safely overwrite files that are in use - something that Windows lacks. Safari (or more specifically Webkit) updates are one of the few exceptions to that.

[ThomH]

And some undocumented fixes

The 20-second hard disk churning pause that started about 10 seconds after a launch of Safari (and usually after I'd loaded my first web page) is completely gone. Given that both Firefox and Chrome start a lot more quickly, with Chrome all but instantaneous, and Safari had no problems before they introduced that 'Top Sites' splash page, I'm calling this a bug fix. They've also brought back the URL-bar-is-the-loading-bar feature and finally put the spinner on the front-most tab button, so you're no longer having to mentally distinguish between the current tab and every other tab to spot the 'loading' message.

So that's all the sins of 4.x resolved. Though I'm not sure how much I care about the new features yet. The extensions will be the things to watch, no doubt, just as in Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

wait for it...

...they could call the ad-blocking extension: iDontDoAds... mwah ha ha ha!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari 5: Very pleased so far

Just installed it on my Mac and it goes like the proverbial off a shovel.

Two thumbs up.

[Robert Carnegie]

@Adrian this helps you do your job??

What do you do, write the technology column for the free newspaper they hand out at bus stations?

You are aware that that's where The Register gets stories FROM?

Talk about "the news cycle"...... :-)

[Matthew Henry]

Crashed on Yahoo! UK homepage...

... and a nice new dialog blamed FlashPlayer 10.6!!!

A new front opens up in the War on Flash.

[James O'Shea]

hmm..

It didn't crash on uk.yahoo here. Perhaps you really do need to update your version of Flash Player. Or something.

On the other hand, you're not missing much. 'X Factor Guest judge revealed'... bah. humbug. Feed the lot of them to starving piranhas.

[SImon Hobson]

Woohoo, looks like they've fixed the memory leak

I've found in the past that there's a memory leak in (I assume) Javascript - using Javascript heavy sites would rapidly result in Safari consuming ever more memory. At times the machine would get "quite slow" as it churned away swapping stuff in and out - I've had it up to 4G of swap in use, and with a machine maxed out at 2G of real RAM.

So far, Safari 5 seems to have fixed that - been using the same sites, and I've still got free memory, normally by now I'd have at least half a gig of swap going.

[Richard Fletcher]

Clever

On the one hand Safari Reader makes the web a worse place to make money, and on the other the iPad provides an easier place to make money. That's some strategical thinking there.