Safari 3.1 Pushing the Edge

So with the Safari 3.1 update today, it moves ahead of the other browsers in a few ways. Safari has had an interesting 12 months. First, it came out for Windows. Not that anyone besides developers are using it on Windows, but it means that sites with special Safari-only abilities can be viewed by Windows users, at least. Then, the iPhone and iPod touch came out, with the Safari browser built in. Not a dumbed-down version of Safari, either. It supports all sorts of special Safari things, like the drawing canvas and drop shadows. So Safari is definitely a major player, even if it is missing the market share.
Now we’ve got three new features in Safari 3.1. The first is Web Fonts. This is the ability for a Web site to use a font that the end-user doesn’t have on their machine. The page will specify the location of the font on the server, and Safari will download and use that font.
The second new feature is CSS transitions. Designers can specify various transitions in their style sheets. For instance, when a user moves the cursor over an element on the page, it can smoothly transition from one border size to another. Or an element can be made to “rotate.” Hopefully, these will be used well by designers, and not made to simply grab our attention.
The third new feature is the implementation of the