Lost amidst the Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud melee on Monday was another developer-only release for Safari 5.1. The next version of Apple’s web browser will ship with Lion in July, but here’s what you’ll have to look forward to.
9to5Mac is reporting that Apple has released a Safari 5.1 beta for developers, as if they don’t have enough new toys to play with during WWDC 2011 this week. The 45.3MB download will arrive as part of Mac OS X Lion when it’s released to the Mac App Store for a mere $29.99 next month.
So what’s new in Safari 5.1, you ask? The browser will finally “take advantage of GPU acceleration on Windows and enable new HTML5 APIs, allowing for the creation of much more sophisticated web apps.” Also on deck are recent CSS3 treats including Text Emphasis, Vertical Text, Auto-Hyphenation, Transitions and Animations. Safari 5.1 will also work with the Web Open Font Format as well as Mathematical Markup Language (MathML to most of us).
The more exciting news for end users of Safari is the next version will allow plug-ins and the WebKit rendering engine alike to “now run in their own process separately of the main Safari process, meaning a misbehaving plug-in or HTML code cannot crash the browser.” This is the kind of stuff that Google Chrome has long beaten Apple to the punch on -- but wait, there’s more!
“Improved HTML5 media capabilities include audio and video caching for smoother content streaming,” 9to5Mac reveals. “Web apps will be able to tell when the user’s tab is inactive in order to suspend or resume their process as to not tax the browser unnecessarily. Web developers will also love the new keyboard behavior controls, support for full-screen content and interactive popover menus -- all handled via HTML5.”
Sounds like a pretty boffo update to be sure, so we look forward to getting our own hands on it -- along with the rest of Mac OS X Lion -- come next month.
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(Image courtesy of 9to5Mac)
