Safari Browser :

Safari Browser :

is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10. 3 "Panther". Safari is also the native browser for iOS. A version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows operating system, first released on June 11, 2007, supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, andWindows 7. According to Net Applications, Safari accounted for 62.17 percent of mobile web browsing traffic and 5.43 percent of desktop traffic in October 2011, giving a combined market share of 8.72 percent. Safari is the fourth most popular web browser, behind Internet Explorer (49.59 percent), Mozilla Firefox (21.20), and Google Chrome (16.60)

History and development :

Safari 1 : On January 7, 2003, at Macworld San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed their own web browser, called Safari. It was based on Apple's internal fork of theKHTML rendering engine, called Web Kit. Apple released the first beta version for OS X that day .

Safari 2 : In April 2005, Dave Hyatt, one of the Safari developers at Apple, documented his progress in fixing specific bugs in Safari, thereby enabling it to pass the Acid2 test developed by the Web Standards Project. On April 27, 2005, he announced that his development version of Safari now passed the test, making it the first web browser to do so. Safari 3 : On January 9, 2007, at Macworld SF, Jobs announced Apple's iPhone, which would use a mobile version of the Safari browser. On June 11, 2007, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs announced Safari 3 for Mac OS X v10.5, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. During the announcement, he ran a benchmark based on the iBench browser test suite comparing the most popular Windows browsers, hence claiming that Safari was the fastest browser.

Safari 4 : On June 2, 2008, the WebKit development team announced Squirrelfish, a new JavaScript engine that vastly improves Safari's speed at interpreting scripts. The engine is one of the new features in Safari 4, released to developers on June 11, 2008. The new JavaScript engine quickly evolved into SquirrelFish Extreme, featuring even further improved performance over SquirrelFish, and was eventually marketed as Nitro.

Safari 5 : Apple released Safari 5 on June 7, 2010, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction (based on Arc90's Readability tool and a 30 percent Javascript performance increase over Safari 4. Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies, focused on interoperability.

Advantages:
Ability to save webpage clips for viewing on the Apple Dashboard (Mac OS X only) A resizable web-search box in the toolbar which allows choice among Google,Yahoo! or Bing only Automatic filling in of web forms ("autofill") Bookmark integration with Address Book Bookmark management Built-in password management via Keychain (Mac OS X only) History and bookmark search Expandable text boxes ICC color profile support Inline PDF viewing (Mac OS X only) iPhoto integration (Mac OS X only) Mail integration (Mac OS X only) Pop-up ad blocking

Disadvantages:
Distribution through Apple Software Update : An earlier version of Apple Software Update (bundled with Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes for Microsoft Windows) selected Safari for installation from a list of Apple programs to download by default, even when a preexisting installation of Safari was not detected on a user's machine.

Browser exploits : In the PWN2OWN contest at the 2008 CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a successful exploit of Safari caused Mac OS X to be the first OS to fall in a hacking competition.

Malware blocking : In recent analysis, the stable version of Safari blocked 13% of malicious URLs. In contrast, Internet Explorer 9 blocked 92% of malware with its URL-based filtering, and a full 100% with Application-based filtering enabled. Internet Explorer 8, in second place, blocked 90% of malware .

Software license agreement : The original software license agreement for Safari on Windows was unusually restrictive for several months, reading in part: This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time