Touted by Apple to be the fastest browser in the world, Safari 5, based on the Web-Kit layout engine, has been around since nearly a year. The interface, through not Aqua, is reminiscent of the Mac OS X user interface. The Top Sites page is visually appealing, and like Chrome’s Most Visited section or Opera’s Speed Dial, it shows your most visited sites in a layout akin to the Cover Flow view.
Safari got its own extensions gallery in July last year, and has a large collection of extensions to offer, albeit not as many as those available for Firefox or Chrome. JavaScript is handled by the new Nitro JavaScript engine, which has been claimed to make Safari 5 run 30 percent faster than its predecessor. Rendering is perfect and Safari 5.0.5 scores a perfect 100 on 100 in the ACID3 test. However, it logged some of the lowest scores on the Peacekeeper benchmark and had the highest response time on the Sun Spider test with 293.3 ms.
On the HTML5 test too, Safari failed to impress. On firing up Safari 5, it consumed nearly 79 MB of RAM, but as the number of tabs increased, it didn’t end up consuming additional resources. Overall Memory usage was just around 240 MB, But the Loading of tabs slow down, almost coming to a halt. The Apple Safari 5 fails to perform or impress, and unless you are a rabid Apple loyalist, give this one a miss.
