So along with all the announcements of the new iPhone 4 and iOS 4, Apple snuck in an update to Safari. Safari 5 has some impressive speed improvements and has added a new Reader function that looks like it could use some improvements, but it’s not a bad first try.
For me personally, there has been a big improvement in the fixing of some nasty bugs that were causing some strange things to happen to Safari when launching, if I had Top Sites set to display when loaded or on new tab/window. So far, I’m not seeing the problems anymore.
Some of the new features of Safari 5 are:
Reader: Basically a mobilizer for the desktop. When on a page with an article, a small icon appears in the address bar: 
. Clicking on this image brings up a page and dims the original page that shows the article, without ads and other visual distractions. You can zoom in and out, email the page and print the page using controls similar to that seen with PDF documents.
HTML5 Support: Just more support for the replacement technology of Flash in Steve’s mind. There are 17 features added and you can see a demo of how HTML5 works in Safari here.
Better Performance: Apple claims 30% faster than Safari 4, a whopping 3% faster than Google Chrome, and over twice as fast as Firefox.
Bing and Yahoo! Search: Apple has added the ability to search using Yahoo!, Bing as well as Google. The default is Google, but can be easily changed in Safari’s Preference dialog on the General tab right under the default browser setting.
Extension support: Finally, Safari 5 supports developers creating extensions just like every other browser on the planet. The extensions are written in Javascript using HTML5 and CSS3 so they will be more compatible than any other extension that has ever been written for Safari before. No more SIMBL weirdness. Panic has already written an extension and demoed it at WWDC. It’s unclear when extensions will be available for download and how they will be managed.
Smarter Address Field: Again, Apple has finally caught up with Firefox and Chrome with this improvement. You can now type in text of a web page title that you saw in the past and Safari 5 will search your web history for that text and display possible pages to open.
There are other improvements, but those are really the biggies.
So not a bunch, and this probably explains why it wasn’t mentioned in the keynote. That and they probably wanted to focus on iPhone 4 and iOS 4.
