This week, Apple has released much awaited and anticipated new version of their Safari web browser – 3.1, which brings quite a number of improvements to this already quite competitive browser.
Through the system of automatic upgrades for OS X Tiger and OS X Leopard, as well as through the Apple Update for Windows, everyone on those platforms can have their own copy of Safari 3.1. Interesting is that Apple actually distributing new Safari version through the ITunes for Windows – for OS X there is no need, because it is already pre-installed. It is quite unusual and may be even considered disturbing, but there is no doubt, that Apple is going to test and to push the limits of their money cow – ITunes.
Lets get back to the browser itself. Besides speed, and all the usual small stuff, there is a number of very delicious improvements, which are putting Safari in front of the other browsers are: HTML5 Client-site database storage(creating basically a real database at the client side with SQL commands), Downloadable fonts (think of supplying your special font to the site visitor – here is an article at “A List Apart” on this topic), CSS transforms and CSS animations (scale,rotate,translate,skew etc – from this one there can be some interesting animations, though one should be always careful with this one, otherwise we will end all blinking, scaling and flipping our heads), HTML 5 video and audio tags (no other descriptions are needed, i believe), SVG graphics inside IMG tags.
Not to forget, the most anticipated and awaited feature of Safari for web developers – “Web Inspector”. To enable it goto Safari Preferences, select “Advanced” tab and there enable “Show develop menu in menu bar” – and voilá, your have this feature enabled. It should remind you of Web Developer toolbar for firefox and its microsoft IE6/IE7 copy, though i might add an advice of exploring “Web Inspector”, there are some small delicious things, which will make your work easier. So – play the trumpets, we finally have a tool to work and develop websites on Safari – my deepest bow to its developers, cause it was right on time (being the late one, does not take away the sensation of happiness of web developers who can see their job getting a bit easier.)
Ah one more thing – the native “getElementsByClassName” javascript function just rocks!
I like the idea of putting to test new HTML and CSS standards, because all the standards in the world are dead, as long as they are not supported. One could only hope, that other browsers will follow with more complete support of the new HTML and CSS features. No words just thumbs up for “Web Inspector”.