Cupertino (ip-192.com): Apple just released the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5. It has the ability to detect and reformat multipage articles into a single page for easy reading. Called Safari Reader, the new feature automatically removes advertising and other clutter from web pages and presents spread out articles in a scrollable, easy-to-read single page free of many distracting elements. User can email and print "cleaned" articles, and use onscreen controls to zoom-in and out.

Safari 5 includes DNS prefetching, a feature first introduced by Google's Chrome in September 2008. The technology scans all links contained in a webpage and resolves associated IP-addresses in the background. Hardware acceleration is available for Windows environments.

The new browser boasts a 30 percent increase in performance over Safari 4, Apple claims, and is available for Mac and Windows environments. Users can select Google, Bing, or Yahoo as the default search engine. Thanks to HTML5, Geolocation, full screen video playback, closed captions and several other features are now available.

"Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. "Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices."

A new feature borrowed from Firefox is the extension system. Users have the ability to add features by installing extensions, small applications written in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. To maintain the integrity of Safari 5, add-ons will be sandboxed and cryptographically signed by Apple.

The latest version of Apple’s Safari 5 web browser is available for download here.

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