Safari(web browser)

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and released mainly for the Macintosh computers as Apple's default Internet browser. 

 

History

The Safari web browser came to the Internet world in January,2003 as a public beta product. Some months later, right after the release of the final version, Safari became the default web browser in Macintosh computers. Until June,2009 Apple’s Safari has improved greatly offering many new features to its users as long as new versions were released. The most recent Safari release is version number 4.

 

Features

Although Safari is similar to other web browsers as Mozilla Firefox  or Internet Explorer in tearms of features, it still offers exclusive options to its user such as the following:

  •  Top sites, a window that displays the user’s most visited web pages, becoming a sort of a shortcut to the favorite websites.
  •        Coverflow, a dynamical 3D interface where the web pages of the History and the Bookmarks are displayed as snapshots.
  •    Nitro Javascript, an engine that loads JavaScript much more faster than any other web browser.
  •        HTML5 support that allows media integration into standard web pages. 
  •        CSS 3 Animations, a graphical effects package that gives a much more detailed and stylized look to websites, making them smarter and stunning.

 

Despite of these unique characteristics, Safari lacks of an extensive number of plug-ins or complements that expand the browser functionalities and possibilities.This fact places Safari one step behinf other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera or even the newcomer Google Chrome .

Popularity

Despite of its stability and reliable speed to handle web-rendering, Apple’s Safari is not the most popular web browser1. In fact, it is used by the 4% of Internet users. This may be caused because the browser is not available for open source operating systems as Linux-based OS and because of the poor support for external plugins.

 

Availability

Apple’s Safari is freely available for Macintosh computers and for Microsoft’s Windows. A portable version of the Safari web browser is also available for the Apple’s mobile phone, the iPhone, and for Apple’s iPod touch!

 

Bibliography and reference pages

W3Schools Browser Statistics

Internet Browser Review  

About Safari's features - Apple.com 

 Safari - Wikipedia article 



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