Safari 5 may not be the biggest news coming from Apple today but its definitely a significant update it got in some time and seems to be directly competing with Chrome is features and speed. Some of the major improvements are:
Sandboxed Extensions. Safari 5 is following Chromes example by Sandboxing and Digitally Signing extensions for greater security.
Reader. This is a unique and brand new feature for Safari 5. This is similar to how Readability work, which I wrote about earlier today. Reader works by pre-fetching and formatting contents, including removing ads and site-specific styling, giving readers uninterrupted focus on the content. Very cool feature, I can see myself using this often.
Support for more Html5 features: Few days ago, Apple created a Html5 demo page to showcase Safari commitment to Html5 standard, similar to what Microsoft is doing with IE9s Html5 demo page. However the irony of the Safari demo page was that it is only open to Safari browser and it sniffs out non-safari browser by prompting a warning stating that demos are designed for Safari only. Note that all of those demos works just fine with Chrome, you can test those demo in your browser of choice by using this link, which was meant for developers and doesnt block out non-safari browsers. Having said that, its good to see that all major browsers are committed to supporting web standards.
