Safari 3.1 Released
Charles Johnson
Tue Mar 18, 2008 at 4:00 pm PDT • Views: 158
Apple has released the latest version of their Safari web browser, and I’m going to be really spoiled if I use this as my main browser, which I will, because it’s so danged fast. Yes, the Javascript engine in particular is faster than Firefox 3 beta 4.
It’s not only faster, version 3.1 has some very nice standards-oriented enhancements, including support for offline storage, CSS 3 web fonts and special effects, and greatly improved SVG support.
There’s a lot for developers to like, too. The new Web Inspector is fantastic; you can spelunk the DOM in detail at every level, and even alter CSS and HTML attributes on the fly and see the changes in the page. You can also get detailed information on Network operations, including HTTP header info for each request to the server(s), and hints about how to improve the page loading speed. This version allows you to turn on the ‘Develop’ menu in Safari’s Preferences, instead of using a Terminal command, which is handy.
And there’s support for a very powerful Javascript debugger, Drosera. Oh yeah. No more launching Firefox just to use Firebug.
There are supposed to be big improvements in the Windows version too, but I can’t vouch for that because I haven’t tried it yet.
Here’s the download page at Apple: Safari - Download.
Frank says: