A more elegant browser. By design.
Before Safari, browsers were an afterthought. Something you put up with if you wanted to surf the internet. One browser looked and felt just like another, so you chose the one that worked the best and crashed the least. They were ugly, cluttered affairs, whose interfaces competed for your attention and made browsing — the very purpose for which they were created — more difficult. Safari changes all that.
Safari is designed to emphasize the browsing, not the browser. The browser frame is a single pixel wide. You see a scroll bar only when needed. By default, there’s no status bar. Instead, a progress gear turns as your page loads. And if you so choose, you can hide almost the entire interface, removing virtually every distraction from the browser window. A great browser should get out of your way and let you simply enjoy the web. Safari does just that. And it does it regardless of platform.
The first browser to deliver the “real” internet to a mobile device, Safari renders pages on iPhone and iPod touch just as you see them on your computer. But this is more than just a scaled down mobile-version of the original. It takes advantage of the technologies built into these multi-touch devices. The page shifts and reformats to fill the window when you turn it on its side. You zoom in just by pinching and extending your fingers. Of course, no matter how you access it, Safari is always blazing fast and easy-to-use.
Innovation. In plain sight.
Everyone has their favorite web sites. The problem is that you have to click through them one by one. Not anymore. With Top Sites, Safari keeps a running tally of the websites you visit and automatically creates a graphically rich page that displays up to 24 thumbnails of your favorites. That makes it easy to spot the site you want to visit, and to open it with a click.
Look before you click.
Doing things no browser has ever done before, Safari also makes it a lot easier to find sites you’ve visited in the past — but can’t quite remember. Since it stores all the text of every page you visit, Safari can instantly find sites from even the sketchiest search terms. Then it does something really unique. Rather than present a static list of URLs and force you to click repeatedly until you find the right site, Safari shows you every site it’s found in Cover Flow. You flip through the sites, just as you do album art in iTunes. And when you click a webpage in Cover Flow, it’s because you’ve already recognized it as the site you were looking for.
Safari turns the same Cover Flow trick with your bookmarked sites. As you flip through your bookmarks, Safari lets you see the sites just as they appeared when you last visited them. Spot the right preview, and with a click, Safari takes you there instantly.
Technology that Invites Innovation
The world’s fastest browser, Safari has speed to burn. Why should you wait for pages to load? You want to see those search results, get the latest news, check current stock prices, right now. And Safari delivers, letting you wait less and browse more. In fact, every Safari update is tested to make certain it continues to deliver the fastest browsing experience on any platform.
Safari is leading the way to a standards-based Internet. Standards matter. Before standards, every browser had its own play book. With standards, every browser’s on the same page. Great for developers, standards let them create sites that work on all browsers out of the box. Great for the browsing public, they assure that you enjoy a great experience on every site you visit.
That’s why Apple has adopted and has taken an active role in defining standards, such as HTML 5 and CSS 3, that ensure consistency and push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web.
Safari was the first browser to support HTML 5 audio and video tags. They allow developers to integrate media directly into standard web pages, reducing development time and leading to faster response for you. And by supporting HTML 5 offline technologies, Safari allows web-based applications to store information on your hard drive, so you can use them even without an Internet connection.
And Safari was the first browser to support CSS 3 Animations, which bring a new level of interactivity to the web, and CSS Effects, which let developers add polish to websites by stylizing images and photos with eye-catching gradients, precise masks, and stunning reflections.
Apple has also consistently demonstrated its leadership in supporting the latest standards by passing both Acid 2 and Acid 3 before any other browser. Designed by the Web Standards Project, Acid tests confirm a browser’s ability to handle the latest web standards.
Innovation starts with WebKit, the technology at the heart of Safari. Powering Safari on iPhone and iPod touch and Safari 4 on the Mac and PC, WebKit displays graphics, renders fonts, determines page layout, and powers the interactivity of the sites you visit on a daily basis.
Created by Apple engineers, WebKit simplifies web development and accelerates innovation. An open source toolset, WebKit is free for anyone to use. In fact, right now an entire community of engineers are refining and streamlining the code to be faster and more reliable — all in the interest of making the web a better place. That’s teamwork on a very large scale, and the web’s a better place for it.
Now used in more than 100 products on desktop and mobile products, WebKit has been adopted for use in Google Chrome and for AOL Desktop for Mac. It’s used as the web rendering engine in Adobe AIR, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Microsoft Entourage. And it’s become the new standard for mobile browsers, WebKit powers Google Android, Nokia Series 60, and the Palm WebOS.
The browser that has your back.
Yes, the web can be a scary place. But when you use Safari, you can surf worry free. To keep your browsing your business, Safari offers Private Browsing. Simply turn it on, and Safari stops recording the sites you visit and the software or docs you download. It also stops storing your Google searches, cookies, and the data in online forms you fill out. So feel free to shop online or check your bank account from a shared or public computer.
To prevent companies from tracking the cookies generated by the websites you visit, Safari blocks them by default. Then it automatically erases cookie trails and accepts cookies only from your current domain. It also provides built-in pop-up blocking, so you don’t have to be bothered by unwanted ads. Read more about privacy protection on the Safari Features page.
Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one. And they continue to build improvements into Safari with each new release. For example, anti-phishing and malware technology is built-in, so if you visit a site that might contain phishing or malware content, it automatically alerts you and won’t open the page. Thanks to its new EV (or Extended Validation) Certificate support, Safari highlights legitimate websites and businesses, letting you feel confident about purchasing items or sharing personal information online.
Safari also provides secure encryption technologies to prevent eavesdropping, forgery, and digital tampering while you browse the Internet. It offers standards-based authentication for logging into secure websites, and it supports the most popular proxy protocols. Browsing on a Mac? Offering Safe Downloads, Safari tags each download with information about when and where you downloaded it and reminds you where it came from the first time you open it. To keep your browser up to date and secure, Safari also provides easy access to the latest security updates via Apple Software Update. To learn more about security in Safari, visit the 150 Features page.
