MacMost Now 408: Safari 5 New Features

Learn about Safari 5's new features, including address bar enhancements, Safari Reader, Bing search, performance enhancements and extensions.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.In today's episode lets look at the new Safari 5.This episode of MacMost Now is marqueed by Gazelle.com.Gazelle is the easiest,fastest way to sell or recycle your gadgets.Every item gets an offer and you get paid to be environmentally responsible.Use promo code at MacMost with 5 % bonus.
So in conjunction with the worldwide developers conference,apple released a new version of Safari on monday.You can get it by using software update on your Mac.Lets take a look at what features are new.
First we've got performance enhancements.Most notably,we have a 25% increase on how fast code on a webpage java script executes.This will speed up a lot of webpages and in addition to that we have something called DNS prefetching.This means that when you load up a page its far as going to look at all the link in the page and figure out where all those are located.So instead of waiting for you to click on one of them and then figure out where the web page is located,its going to do that in advance.So you click on it and you should be able to quickly access that server and download the new page.
Next we have more support for HTML file tags.So this is the next version of HTML that includes special tags for things like video,audio,due location and stuff like that.
This will enable web developers to create even richer web applications and Safari 5 supports a lot of other stuff right now.Now there are also some enhancements to how the address bar works on top of Safari.
So for instance in the past you could type in a url and it'll try to auto complete it.So for instance lets say we want to go to the MacMost article on online password security.
I can start typing in and i can see that it gives me some choices below on my history,i could actually arrow down to the articulate 1 or i can continue typing and it will narrow it down.So soon as i type that O for instance ,it knows that the only thing in its history is the online password security.html article.And it also knows that to the right it gives me the title guide on my password security.Now i can start over again and instead of typing in the URL,i could actually type the title of the page so if i start typing online password security,you can see it there,it will actually do the opposite,it will put the title here to the left and it will put the URL to the right.And i can hit return here even though all i've typed is part of the title and not part of the URL and it will take me right to the article.Now am at this page i can demonstrate perhaps the most controversial feature of Safari 5 and thats the Safari reader.So am here at the page,its a blog post here with a long article and right here i usually would see the RSS button instead i see a Reader button,i press it and this is what i get.I get this special page in the middle and you can still see the regular page in the background here.This page just puts the text and the title and the images in the body of the article and puts them in larger text so i could read them easily.
This is called Safari reader and it basically allows you to centre in on just the text of the article and read it in easier format without all the rest of the stuff ,the navigation bars,the side bars or the ads on the rest of the web page.
So this is controversial because its just playing the content of the page in a way that the content creator did not intend.Content creator designed a web page with side bar navigation perhaps comments and none of that will be visible when you hit that reader button.Of course the advertisement won't be there either.This is a problem because lot of those sites like MacMost.com pay the bills with those ads.So when our people start using Safari reader then our revenue will drop and some of this content will just go away.
Now apple is making a big deal that they are now good at being a search engine like Safari.You could always have gone to bing.com and done a search,but now its included in the dropdown list here as one of the search engines that you could choose.And you could also go to your Safari preferences under general and set your default search engine to Bing.
And last but not least we've got extensions.This last developer's team that create toolbars and similar things that extend safari.
Now this is all just for enduing that there is a Safari extension developer program open already for developers.But there would be a gallery of extensions set up until later this summer.so for now there'll be a lot of developers creating extensions and later this summer we'll get to see some of them and use them.
Hope you like this quick look at Safari 5.Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 13 Responses to “MacMost Now 408: Safari 5 New Features”

Brian Huffman

14 years ago

Thanks for getting this out so quick. Very timely.

Jim Harlan

You didn't tell the best part of Reader. You can print the article without all the ads, saving us a lot of ink and paper.

Gary Rosenzweig

Good point. More headaches for content producers :)

Zalman

Hi,

since I upgraded to safari 5, the videos are not viewable anymore. Some graphics too, I get blank space instead. right now when I clicked the link in your newsletter to your video about new features, I have blank space instead of video.
what's the fix Garry ?

Thank you very much, and enjoying your videos a lot!

Try re-installing Flash. That should do it.

Daniel

Very cool review Gary!
Sorry to say I'm going to love "Reader," feature! After reading and doing reports all day, pushing one button to see larger text is a God sent to me.

sorry Gary, how do I do that ?
Thanks!

Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Thanks so MUCH!

Kevin

I agree that screening out the ads is a problem for site owners who get paid that way, but the increased type size of Reader is great for those of us who get tired of articles whose type size is too small. Like everything in life, I guess it's a trade-off.

Franco

I installed Safari 5 when it was first released. I went back to Safari 4 because Safari 5 was very slow. I know that many others had the same problem. Has Apple corrected that problem? BTW your articles and video podcasts are awesome. I'm a fairly new Apple user, making the switch about 11 months ago from a PC. Very thankful to discover your site.

If there was a speed issue with Safari 5, it must have been for very few people. I updated all my Macs immediately and have seen nothing but speed increases, not decreases. I haven't had any problems. In fact, Safari 5 will be less problematic because of the way it operates -- isolating things like Flash so one crash doesn't take down the whole application.

I reinstalled Safari 5 some time ago and changed my DNS. Safari 5 now moves at lightning speed. Once again thanks for such an awesome site.

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MacMost Now 408: Safari 5 New Features

Comments: 13 Responses to “MacMost Now 408: Safari 5 New Features”

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