Apple Safari 5 Upgrade Is Seamless: Review

The address field in Safari 5 can match text against webpage title fields as recorded in bookmarks and the browser history. This was previously limited to matching strings in URLs.

Accessing one’s browser history is a little easier in this release of Safari, with the addition of a date indicator in the Full History Search function that displays the last-viewed date of a page. Users can switch between Full History Search and Top Sites views.

Those who prefer to avoid recording their every move on the web can now verify at a glance that their tracks are covered. Safari 5 adds a “Private” indicator icon in the address field; clicking on this icon turns off private browsing features.

Security

Security features weren’t neglected in Safari 5, which include an auditor for cross-site scripting, or XSS, designed to filter scripts that could be malicious. Web applications that make use of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) are said by Apple to run more quickly and securely in this release as well.

Finally, users who do their browsing in one tabbed window now have the option to open new web pages in tabs, rather than creating a new window.

I spent the better part of a week using Safari on both Mac OS X and Windows, and to be honest, the Reader and Bing options were the things I noticed. Then again, I’m not a web developer, so any features aimed at the under-the-hood operations will never grab my attention, and I wouldn’t use tabbed browsing unless my life (or my paycheck) depended on it.

What stood out to me, first, foremost and more vividly than any user interface enhancements, was what didn’t happen: Upgrading to Safari 5 didn’t disable any of my preferred plug-ins. I don’t use many, but the ones I have make a big difference in my productivity. Safari 5 may not persuade anyone to move off Firefox or IE, but for those looking for something better than Safari 4, it’s here.