Safari 5 is out. Slower startup, still slower than Chrome.

Yup... Apple snuck in a major update to their Safari Web Browser today.  It was pretty much a "silent" upgrade and for good reason.  Not much has changed. Certainly not enough to justify a major version change (4.x to 5.x).

While Apple claims that it runs javascript 30% faster than Safari 4, on my MacBook Pro it takes longer to load web pages than Safari 4.  Chrome is still the speed demon of web browsers for either HTML or Javascript.  Independent benchmarks show that Safari 5 is still running javascript at 2/3 the speed of Chrome 5 or Chrome 6.

Why do I care about javascript speed?  Well for one, I play three games on Facebook and two of them use HTML5.  Ok, HTML and javascript which are two of the three big deal features of current proposed specifications for the proposed HTML5 standard, the third being H.264 video.

If Mr. Jobs gets his way and the world+dog drops Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Java for the year 2022 W3C HTML5 standard, then javascript speed will be THE yardstick for web browsers.  (Current Safari 5 runs in 3rd place behind Opera 10.6 and Google Chrome from what I've read on the net.)  Keep on those Apple developers Steve... you only have 12 years to catch up.

There are a few tweaks to tabs and the like... the biggest feature is actually a thing called Safari Reader.  In a nutshell, after a page is loaded and Safari detects a large block of text down the middle and smaller blocks on the side, it offers a "reader" button up in the address bar.

Clicking this button blacks out everything but the central column of text and formats that text for easy reading.  While this cuts down on distractions and may make it easier for the vision impaired to read, it also hides all sidebar information and more importantly, things like Google Ads.  Yup another shot across the bows in Steve's ongoing battle with Google.

Oh yes, any artistic design choices made by the author of the site are wiped out at the same time, leaving a black on white screen using one standard font.

As far as I'm concerned the biggest improvement in Safari 5 is that it finally remembers the windows and tabs you had open last time, thus bringing them into parity with Chrome, Opera and Firefox on this feature.

So far though, I see nothing worth the 5.x moniker, nor the upgrade.  Apple being Apple though and wanting to ensure "the best possible user experience" they make it extremely difficult, if not impossible to revert back to Safari 4.

Then again, that is what backups are all about. ;-)