Apple Announces Safari 3.1

Apple has introduced Safari 3.1, for Mac and Windows PCs.

Available immediately as a free download from here, Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. It also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers

"Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

Safari features an intuitive browsing experience with drag-and-drop bookmarks, easy-to-organize tabs, an integrated Find that shows the number of matches in a page and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information. Safari 3.1 also supports the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and is the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts.

Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple’s Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.

Safari 3.1 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.11, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 3.1 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.