Safari is a
web browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
developed by Apple Inc. and included with the
Mac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's
Mac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
operating systemAn operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the native browser for iOS. A version of Safari for the
Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
operating system, first released on June 11, 2007, supports
Windows XPWindows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
,
Windows VistaWindows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
, and Windows 7. The latest stable release of the browser is 5.1.1, which is available as a free download for both
Mac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
and
Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. According to
Net ApplicationsNet Applications is a web analytics firm. The company is commonly known in the web browser development and technology news communities for its global market share statistics.-Net Applications History:...
, Safari accounted for 62.17 percent of mobile web browsing traffic and 5.43 percent of desktop traffic in October 2011, giving a combined market share of 8.72 percent. Safari is the fourth most popular web browser, behind
Internet ExplorerWindows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
(49.59 percent),
Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
(21.20), and
Google ChromeGoogle Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
(16.60).
History and development
Until 1997,
Apple MacintoshThe Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
computers were shipped with the
Netscape NavigatorNetscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
and
CyberdogCyberdog was an internet suite developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997...
web browsers only.
Internet Explorer for MacInternet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
was later included as the default web browser for
Mac OS 8.1Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It represented the largest overhaul of the Mac OS since the release of System 7, some six years previously. It puts more emphasis on color than previous operating systems...
and onwards, as part of a five year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. During that time, Microsoft released three major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac that were bundled with Mac OS 8 and
Mac OS 9Mac OS 9 is the final major release of Apple's Mac OS before the launch of Mac OS X. Introduced on October 23, 1999, Apple positioned it as "The Best Internet Operating System Ever," highlighting Sherlock 2's Internet search capabilities, integration with Apple's free online services known as...
, though Apple continued to include Netscape Navigator as an alternative. Microsoft ultimately released a Mac OS X edition of Internet Explorer for Mac, which was included as the default browser in all Mac OS X releases from Mac OS X DP4 until
Mac OS X v10.2Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" is the third major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It superseded Mac OS X v10.1 code name Puma and preceded Mac OS X Panther...
.
Safari 1
On January 7, 2003, at
MacworldProduced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
San Francisco,
Steve JobsSteven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
announced that Apple had developed their own web browser, called Safari. It was based on Apple's internal
forkIn software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...
of the
KHTMLKHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project. It is the engine used by the Konqueror web browser. A forked version of KHTML called WebKit is used by several web browsers, among them Safari and Google Chrome...
rendering engineA web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
, called
WebKitWebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...
. Apple released the first beta version for OS X that day. A number of official and unofficial beta versions followed, until
version 1.0 was released on June 23, 2003. Initially only available as a separate download for Mac OS X v10.2, it was included with the Mac OS X v10.3 release on October 24, 2003 as the default browser, with Internet Explorer for Mac included only as an alternative browser. 1.0.3, released on August 13, 2004 was the last version to support Mac OS X v10.2, while 1.3.2, released on January 12, 2006 was the last version to support Mac OS X v10.3. However, 10.3 received security updates through 2007.
Safari 2
In April 2005,
Dave HyattDave Hyatt is an American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc. , where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser and WebKit framework. Hyatt was part of the original team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari...
, one of the Safari developers at Apple, documented his progress in fixing specific
bugsA software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
in Safari, thereby enabling it to pass the
Acid2Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
test developed by the
Web Standards ProjectThe Web Standards Project is a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies....
. On April 27, 2005, he announced that his development version of Safari now passed the test, making it the first web browser to do so.
Safari 2.0 was released on April 29, 2005 as the only web browser included with
Mac OS X v10.4Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger is the fifth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Tiger was released to the public on 29 April 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X Panther , which had been released 18 months earlier...
. This version was touted by Apple as possessing a 1.8x speed boost over version 1.2.4, but did not yet include the Acid2 bug fixes. The necessary changes were not initially available to end-users unless they downloaded and compiled the WebKit
source codeIn computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
themselves or ran one of the nightly automated builds available at OpenDarwin.org. Apple eventually released version 2.0.2 of Safari, which included the modifications required to pass Acid2, on October 31, 2005.
In June 2005, after some criticism from KHTML developers over lack of access to change logs, Apple moved the development source code and bug tracking of WebCore and JavaScriptCore to OpenDarwin.org. WebKit itself was also released as open source. The source code for non-renderer aspects of the browser, such as its
GUIIn computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
elements, remains proprietary.
The final stable version of Safari 2, Safari 2.0.4, was released on January 10, 2006 for Mac OS X. It was only available as part of Mac OS X Update 10.4.4. This version addresses layout and CPU usage issues, among others. Safari 2.0.4 was the last version to be released exclusively on Mac OS X.
Safari 3
On January 9, 2007, at Macworld SF, Jobs announced Apple's
iPhoneThe iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, which would use a mobile version of the Safari browser.
On June 11, 2007, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs announced Safari 3 for
Mac OS X v10.5Mac OS X Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on 26 October 2007 as the successor of Tiger , and is available in two variants: a desktop version suitable for personal computers, and a...
, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. During the announcement, he ran a benchmark based on the
iBenchiBench is a discontinued web browser test suite written in ASP and JavaScript by Lionbridge, VeriTest and PC Magazine.According to Apple "most respected browser benchmarks there are available" ....
browser test suite comparing the most popular Windows browsers, hence claiming that Safari was the fastest browser. Later third-party tests of
HTTPThe Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web....
load times would support Apple's claim that Safari 3 was indeed the fastest browser on the Windows platform in terms of initial data loading over the Internet, though it was found to be only negligibly faster than
Internet Explorer 7Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...
and
Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
when loading static content from local cache.
The initial Safari 3 beta version for Windows, released on the same day as its announcement at WWDC 2007, had several known bugs and a zero day exploit that allowed remote execution. The addressed bugs were then corrected by Apple three days later on June 14, 2007, in version 3.0.1 for Windows. On June 22, 2007, Apple released Safari 3.0.2 to address some bugs, performance issues and other security issues. Safari 3.0.2 for Windows handles some fonts that are missing in the browser but already installed on Windows computers, such as Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, and others.
The
iPhoneThe iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
was formally released on June 29, 2007. It includes a version of Safari based on the same WebKit rendering engine as the desktop version, but with a modified feature set better suited for a mobile device. The version number of Safari as reported in its
user agent stringIn computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
is 3.0, in line with the contemporary desktop versions of Safari.
The first stable, non-beta release of Safari for Windows, Safari 3.1, was offered as a free download on March 18, 2008. In June 2008, Apple released version 3.1.2, addressing a security vulnerability in the Windows version where visiting a malicious web site could force a download of executable files and execute them on the user's desktop.
Safari 3.2, released on November 13, 2008, introduced anti-
phishingPhishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
features and Extended Validation Certificate support. The final version of Safari 3 is 3.2.3, released on May 12, 2009.
Safari 4
On June 2, 2008, the WebKit development team announced SquirrelFish, a new
JavaScript engineA JavaScript engine is specialized computer software which interprets and executes JavaScript . Although there are several uses for a JavaScript engine, it is most commonly used in web browsers.-History:...
that vastly improves Safari's speed at interpreting scripts. The engine is one of the new features in Safari 4, released to developers on June 11, 2008. The new JavaScript engine quickly evolved into SquirrelFish Extreme, featuring even further improved performance over SquirrelFish, and was eventually marketed as Nitro. A public beta of Safari 4 was released on February 24, 2009, with new features such as the Top Sites tool (similar to
OperaOpera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
's Speed Dial feature), which displays the user's most visited sites on a 3D wall. Cover Flow, a feature of Mac OS X and
iTunesiTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
, was also implemented in Safari. In the public beta versions,
tabsIn the area of graphical user interfaces , a tabbed document interface is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents...
were placed in the title bar of the window, similar to
Google ChromeGoogle Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
. The tab bar was moved back to its original location, below the
URLIn computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
bar, in the final release. The Windows version adopted a native Windows
themeIn computing, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customize the look and feel of an operating system, widget set or window manager....
, rather than the previously employed Mac OS X-style interface. Also Apple removed the blue progress bar located in the address bar (later reinstated in Safari 5). Safari 4.0.1 was released for Mac on June 17 and fixed problems with Faces in
iPhotoiPhoto is a digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. and released with every Macintosh personal computer as part of the iLife suite of digital life management applications...
'09. Safari 4 in
Mac OS X v10.6Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the seventh major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference...
"Snow Leopard" has 64-bit support, which can make
JavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
loading up to 50% faster. It also has built-in crash resistance unique to Snow Leopard; crash resistance will keep the browser intact if a plug-in like Flash player crashes, such that the other tabs or windows will be unaffected. Safari 4.0.4, released on November 11, 2009 for both OS X and Windows, further improves JavaScript performance.
Safari was one of the twelve
browsers offeredBrowserChoice.eu is a website that was created in March 2010 as the result of the European Union Microsoft competition case which involved legal proceedings by the EU against Microsoft that found that, via market dominance of the operating system market with Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer's...
to EU users of
Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
in 2010. It is also one of the five browsers displayed on the first page of browser choices along with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.
Safari 5
Apple released Safari 5 on June 7, 2010, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction (based on Arc90's Readability tool), and a 30 percent Javascript performance increase over Safari 4. Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies, focused on interoperability. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience. Apple also re-added the progress bar behind the address bar in this release. Safari 5.0.1 enabled the Extensions PrefPane by default; previously, users had to enable it via the Debug menu.
Apple also released Safari 4.1 concurrently with Safari 5, exclusively for Mac OS X Tiger. The update included the majority of the features and security enhancements found in Safari 5. It did not, however, include Safari Reader or Safari Extensions.
Together with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple released Safari 5.1 for both Windows and Mac on July 20, 2011, with the new function 'Reading List' and a faster browsing experience. Apple simultaneously released Safari 5.06 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, excluding Leopard users from the new functions in Safari 5.1.
WebKit2
On April 9, 2010, Apple announced WebKit2. This was integrated into Safari as of version 5.1.
"WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the Web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process," wrote Apple developer Anders Carlsson to WebKit's public mailing list on April 8, 2010. "This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it."
The "process split" model to which Carlsson refers is the architecture that enables processes spawned by the browser, including add-ons and Web apps, to be run as separate processes in the operating system while still being protected by the browser's
sandboxIn computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for separating running programs. It is often used to execute untested code, or untrusted programs from unverified third-parties, suppliers, untrusted users and untrusted websites....
. Google's Chromium team developed the first such model in working form for its
Chrome browserGoogle Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
.
Features
Safari offers numerous features, including:
- Ability to save webpage clips for viewing on the Apple Dashboard (Mac OS X only)
- A resizable web-search box in the toolbar which allows choice among Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
or BingBing is a web search engine from Microsoft.Bing may also refer to:* An onomatopœia of a bell sound* Bing cherry, a variety of cherry* Bing , Chinese flatbread* Bing , a German company that manufactured toys and kitchen utensils...
only
- Automatic filling in of web forms
A webform on a web page allows a user to enter data that is sent to a server for processing. Webforms resemble paper or database forms because internet users fill out the forms using checkboxes, radio buttons, or text fields...
("autofillAutofill is a function in some computer applications or programs, typically those containing forms, which fills in a field automatically.Most of the time, such as in Internet Explorer and Google Toolbar, the entries depend on the form field's name, so as to not enter street names in a last name...
")
- Bookmark integration with Address Book
- Bookmark management
- Built-in password management via Keychain (Mac OS X only)
- History
In computing, the web browsing history refers to the list of web pages a user has visited recently—and associated data such as page title and time of visit—which is recorded by web browser software as standard for a certain period of time...
and bookmark search
- Expandable text boxes
- ICC
The International Color Consortium was formed in 1993 by eight industry vendors in order to create a universal color management system that would function transparently across all operating systems and software packages....
color profile support
- Inline PDF
Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
viewing (Mac OS X only)
- iPhoto
iPhoto is a digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. and released with every Macintosh personal computer as part of the iLife suite of digital life management applications...
integration (Mac OS X only)
- Mail
Mail is an email program included with Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. Originally developed by NeXT as NeXTMail, a part of their NeXTSTEP operating system, it was adapted, following Apple's acquisition of NeXT, to become OS X's Mail application.Mail uses the SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols,...
integration (Mac OS X only)
- Pop-up ad
Pop-up ads or pop-ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements...
blocking
- Private browsing
Privacy mode, sometimes informally referred to as "porn mode", or "private browsing" is a term that refers to privacy features in some web browsers. Historically speaking, web browsers store information such as browsing history, images, videos and text within cache...
- Quartz
Quartz specifically refers to a pair of Mac OS X technologies, each part of the Core Graphics framework: Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor. It includes both a 2D renderer in Core Graphics and the composition engine that sends instructions to the graphics card...
-style font smoothingFont rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description to a raster or bitmap description. This often involves some anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read...
- Reader mode, for viewing an uncluttered version of Web articles
- Spell checking
In computing, a spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary,...
- Subscribing to and reading web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
s
- Support for CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
3 web fontsWeb typography refers to the use of fonts on the World Wide Web. When HTML was first created, font faces and styles were controlled exclusively by the settings of each Web browser. There was no mechanism for individual Web pages to control font display until Netscape introduced the tag in 1995,...
- Support for CSS animation
- Support for HTML5
- Support for Transport Layer Security
Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet...
protocol (version unknown)
- Tabbed browsing
- Text search
In computing, incremental search, incremental find or real-time suggestions is a user interface interaction method to progressively search for and filter through text. As the user types text, one or more possible matches for the text are found and immediately presented to the user...
- Web Inspector, a DOM Inspector
DOM Inspector is a web developer tool created by Joe Hewitt and was originally included in Mozilla Application Suite as well as versions of Mozilla Firefox prior to Firefox 3. It is now included by default in SeaMonkey and is an installable extension for subsequent versions of Firefox and other...
-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object ModelThe Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Aspects of the DOM may be addressed and manipulated within the syntax of the programming language in use...
of a web page
On Mac OS X, Safari is a
CocoaCocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface for the Mac OS X operating system and—along with the Cocoa Touch extension for gesture recognition and animation—for applications for the iOS operating system, used on Apple devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and...
application. It uses Apple's WebKit for rendering web pages and running JavaScript. WebKit consists of WebCore (based on
KonquerorNot to be confused with the Conqueror web browser.Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality for file systems such as local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment...
's KHTML engine) and JavaScriptCore (originally based on KDE's JavaScript engine, named KJS). Like KHTML and KJS, WebCore and JavaScriptCore are
free softwareFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and are released under the terms of the
GNU Lesser General Public LicenseThe GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...
. Some Apple improvements to the KHTML code are merged back into the Konqueror project. Apple also releases additional code under an
open sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
2-clause BSD-like license.
It includes a built-in
web feedA web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
aggregator that supports the
RSS-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
and
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
standards. Other features include Private Browsing (a mode in which no record of information about the user's web activity is retained by the browser), the ability to archive web content in the proprietary
WebarchiveThe webarchive file format is available on Mac OS X and Windows for saving and reviewing complete web pages using the Safari browser. Support for webarchive documents was added in Safari 4 Beta on Windows; Safari 3 on Windows does not support the format....
format, the ability to e-mail complete web pages directly from a browser menu, and the ability to search bookmarks.
New features in Safari 4
Beginning with Safari 4, the address bar has been completely revamped:
- The blue inline progress bar is replaced with a spinning bezel and a loading indicator attached to it.
- The button to add a bookmark is now attached to the address bar by default.
- The reload/stop button is now superimposed on the right end of the address bar.
These modifications make Safari on Mac OS X and Windows look more similar to Safari on iPhone than previous versions.
Safari 4 also includes the following new features:
- Completely passes the Acid3
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
standards test
- Cover Flow browsing for History and Bookmarks
- Improved developer tools, including Web Inspector, CSS element viewing, JavaScript debugger and profiler, offline table and database management with SQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
support, and resource graphs
- Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to eight times faster than Internet Explorer 8
Windows Internet Explorer 8 is a web browser developed by Microsoft in the Internet Explorer browser series. The browser was released on March 19, 2009 for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7. Both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are available...
and more than four times faster than Firefox 3
- Native Windows look on Windows (Aero
Windows Aero is the graphical user interface and the default theme in most editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, operating systems released by Microsoft. It is also available in Windows Server 2008, but is not enabled by default. Its name is a backronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and...
, LunaThemes customize the appearance of the Windows operating system without changing its functionality ....
, Classic, etc., depending on OS and settings) with standard Windows font rendering and optional Apple font rendering
- Support for CSS image retouching effects
- Support for CSS Canvas
- Speculative loading, where Safari loads the documents, scripts, and style information that are required to view a web page ahead of time
- Support for HTML5
- Top Sites, which displays up to 24 thumbnails of a user's most frequently-visited pages on startup
New features in Safari 5
Safari 5 includes the following new features:
- Full-text search through the browser history
- Safari Reader, which removes formatting and ads from webpages.
- Smarter address field, where the address bar autocomplete will match against titles of web page in history or bookmarks.
- Extensions, which are add-ons that customize the web browsing experience.
- Improved support for HTML5, including full screen video, closed caption, geolocation, EventSource, and WebSocket.
- Improved Web Inspector.
- Faster Nitro Javascript Engine.
- DNS prefetching, where Safari finds links and looks up addresses on the web page ahead of time.
- Bing
Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft.Bing may also refer to:* An onomatopœia of a bell sound* Bing cherry, a variety of cherry* Bing , Chinese flatbread* Bing , a German company that manufactured toys and kitchen utensils...
search.
- Improved graphics hardware acceleration on Windows.
Additionally, the blue inline progress bar has returned to the address bar, in addition to the spinning bezel and loading indicator introduced in Safari 4. Top Sites view now has a button to switch to Full History Search. Other features include Extension builder for developers of Safari Extensions, which are built using web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript.
iOS-specific features
iOS-specific features for Safari enable:
- Bookmarking links to particular pages as "Web Clip" icons on the Home screen.
- MDI
Graphical computer applications with a multiple document interface are those whose windows reside under a single parent window , as opposed to all windows being separate from each other . Such systems often allow child windows to embed other windows inside them as well, creating complex nested...
-style browsing (with up to 8 pages open concurrently, limited by cache storage).
- Opening specially-designed pages in full-screen mode.
- Pressing on an image for 3 seconds to save it to the photo album.
- Support for HTML5 new input types.
New in iOS 4.2
- Find feature built into search box.
- Ability to print the current webpage using AirPrint
AirPrint is a component of Apple iOS, version 4.2 or later, for printing via WiFi, either directly to any AirPrint compatible printers such as HP's entire ePrint range, select Brother models, all Epson models produced after fall 2011, or to non-compatible printers through a Windows, Mac or Linux PC...
.
New in iOS 4.3
- Integration of the Nitro JavaScript engine for faster page loads (only available to iPhone 3GS, 3rd Generation iPod Touch, iPad and above) This feature was discovered to only work in the MobileSafari app, and not in the integrated viewer that many apps use.
New in iOS 5
- True tabbed browsing, similar to the desktop experience, only for the iPad and iPad 2.
- Reading List, a bookmarking feature that allows tagging of certain sites for reading later, which syncs across all Safari browsers (mobile and desktop) via Apple's iCloud
iCloud is a cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple Inc. announced on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference . The service allows users to store data such as music files on remote computer servers for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and...
service.
- Reader, a reading feature that can format text and images from a web page into a more readable format, similar to a PDF document, while stripping out web advertising and superfluous information.
System requirements
Safari 5.1 requires either a Mac running Mac OS X v10.6.8, or a
PCIBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
running Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. Official minimum hardware requirements for Windows state a 500 MHz
PentiumA Pentium compatible processor is a 32-bit processor computer chip which supports the instructions in the IA-32 instruction set that were implemented by the Intel P5 Pentium processor family...
processor with 256 MB of RAM for Windows. Cover Flow and Top Sites require a graphics card that is Quartz Extreme-compatible with 16 MB or more video memory for Mac or
DirectXMicrosoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
9-compatible with 64 MB or more video memory for Windows.
Safari 5.0.6 requires a Mac running on Mac OS X 10.5.8.
64-bit builds
The version of Safari included in Mac OS X v10.6 is now
compiledA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
for
64-bit64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s...
architecture. Apple claims that running Safari in 64-bit mode will increase rendering speeds by up to 50%.
Criticism
Distribution through Apple Software Update
An earlier version of Apple Software Update (bundled with Safari,
QuickTimeQuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
, and iTunes for Microsoft Windows) selected Safari for installation from a list of Apple programs to download by default, even when a pre-existing installation of Safari was not detected on a user's machine.
John LillyJohn Lilly may refer to:* John C. Lilly , American physician, psychoanalyst and writer* John Lilly , former Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation...
, CEO of
MozillaMozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
, stated that Apple's use of its updating software to promote its other products was "a bad practice and should stop." He argued that the practice "borders on malware distribution practices" and "undermines the trust that we're all trying to build with users." Apple spokesman Bill Evans responded to Lilly's statement, saying that Apple was only "using Software Update to make it easy and convenient for both Mac and Windows users to get the latest Safari update from Apple." Apple also released a new version of Apple Software Update that puts new software in its own section, though still selected for installation by default. In a newer update, Apple Software Update no longer selected new installation items in the new software section by default (as of late 2008).
On September 22, 2009, Apple once again checked "Install Safari 4" as a default setting with their update to iTunes v9.0.1.
Browser exploits
In the
PWN2OWNPwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held at the annual CanSecWest security conference, beginning in 2007. Contestants are challenged to exploit specific software / computing platform targets with previously unknown vulnerabilities...
contest at the 2008 CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a successful exploit of Safari caused Mac OS X to be the first OS to fall in a hacking competition. Participants competed to find a way to read the contents of a file located on the user's desktop, in one of three operating systems: Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista SP1, and
UbuntuUbuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
7.10. On the second day of the contest, when users were allowed to physically interact with the computers (the prior day permitted only network attacks),
Charlie MillerCharles Miller is a computer security researcher with the consulting firm Accuvant LABS.Prior to his current employment, he spent five years working for the National Security Agency. Miller demonstrated his hacks publicly on products manufactured by Apple...
compromised Mac OS X through an unpatched vulnerability of the PCRE library used by Safari. Miller had been aware of the flaw prior to the beginning of the conference and worked to exploit it unannounced, as is the common approach in these contests. The exploited vulnerability was patched in Safari 3.1.1, among other flaws.
In the 2009 PWN2OWN contest, Charlie Miller performed another successful exploit of Safari to hack into a Mac. Miller again acknowledged that he had advance knowledge of the security flaw prior to the competition, and had done considerable research and preparation work on the exploit. Apple released a patch for this exploit and others on May 12, 2009 with Safari 3.2.3.
Software license agreement
The original
software license agreementA software license agreement is a contract between the "licensor" and purchaser of the right to use software. The license may define ways under which the copy can be used, in addition to the automatic rights of the buyer including the first sale doctrine and .Many form contracts are only contained...
for Safari on Windows was unusually restrictive for several months, reading in part:
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.
As most personal computers running Windows are not Apple-labeled computers, it was impossible for most Windows users to use the software and abide by the license agreement, with the exception of Intel-based Mac computers running Windows. Within hours of the story breaking about the long-unnoticed anomaly, Apple changed the agreement as posted on their website to read:
This license allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on each computer owned or controlled by you.
However, the Safari installer was not immediately updated and still contained the old license. Later installers include corrected copies of the license.
Malware Blocking
In recent analysis, the stable version of Safari blocked 13% of malicious URLS. In contrast, Internet Explorer 9 blocked 92% of malware with its URL-based filtering, and a full 100% with Application-based filtering enabled. Internet Explorer 8, in second place, blocked 90% of malware..
See also
- Browsers that pass Acid3
- Comparison of feed aggregators
The following is a comparison of notable RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.Many BitTorrent clients support RSS feeds for broadcatching ....
- Comparison of web browsers
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.-Historical web browsers:...
- Cyberdog
Cyberdog was an internet suite developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997...
, Apple's OpenDocOpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding ....
-based Internet suite
- iOS, Apple's mobile operating system that includes a version of Safari built-in
- List of feed aggregators
- Month of Bugs
Month of Bugs is an increasingly popular strategy used by security researchers to draw attention to the lax security procedures of commercial software corporations. The tenet is these corporations have shown themselves to be unresponsive and uncooperative to security alerts and that "responsible...
- Safari version history
The version history of Safari spans from 2003 to the present from its initial preview release for Mac OS X at Macworld to becoming cross-platform with versions for Windows and iOS.-Version compatibility:...
- WebKit
WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...
, underlying engine of Safari and other web browsers
External links