Apple today announced that more than 11 million copies of Safari 4
have been downloaded in the first three days of its release,
including more than six million downloads of Safari for Windows.
Safari 4 is the world’s fastest, most innovative browser and is built
on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new
Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript nearly eight times
faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3.
Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than
IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3/
“Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than
11 million downloads in the first three days,” said Philip Schiller,
Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari
users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top
Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow.”
Starting with the development of the open source WebKit browser
engine, Apple has been leading the industry in defining and
implementing innovative web standards. Safari 4 includes HTML 5
support for offline technologies and support for advanced CSS
Effects, enabling an entirely new class of web applications that
feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 is the first browser
to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how
well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG standards that
are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.
Safari 4 includes Top Sites, for an incredible visual preview of
frequently visited and favorite pages; Full History Search, to search
through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently
viewed pages; and Cover Flow, to easily flip through web history or
bookmarks. Other innovative features include Smart Address Fields for
automatically completing web addresses from an easy to read list of
suggestions; Search Fields, to fine tune searches with
recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches; and
Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading
the quality of the site’s layout and text.
In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available later this year, Safari runs as a
64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript
engine by up to 50 percent. Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant
to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a
plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to
reload the affected page. Safari running on Snow Leopard also
delivers HTTP streaming, making it easy to deliver high-quality audio
and video in industry standard formats from any web server without
the need for browser plug-ins.
Safari 4 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free
download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac
OS X Leopard v10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.11 and Security Update
2009-002, a minimum 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 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or
Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a
500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more
information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari.
