Upcoming Web Browser: Safari 5?
What does Apple have on the horizon for Safari as version 4 was just released 2 months ago (June, 2009)? So far we have not heard anything and that isn’t a huge surprise, Apple is a very secrative company. The good news is that Safari is based on the open source WebKit rendering engine, so we can check out the list of feature enhancements added to WebKit since Safari 4 released with AppleWebKit/531.9.
New WebKit features:
- Geolocation API including suspend/resume. This has been in the iPhone browser since last year
- HTML 5 draggable element implementing the current spec
- HTML 5 Forms pattern and required attributes
On top of expected HTML, CSS, and JavaScript improvements, Apple will surly tweak the web browser again to build the most usable web browser. It could be a long time before we see Safari 5, or they may release an incremental Safari 4.1. Further details will come as now we can only speculate.
Estimated Release Date: June 2011
Update: Apple has indeed released Safari 5 with a tun of new HTML5 features and performance improvements, and a year ahead of my estimate; check it out at the Safari What’s New page.