Apple Releases Safari 3.1 Browser

Safari 3.1 "loads Web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2," the company said in a statement. It also claimed that Safari runs JavaScript up to six times faster than the competition. The company claims that Safari 3.1 is the first browser that will support HTML 5 video and audio tags as well as CSS Animations.

The browser update is available as a free download on Apple's site at http://www.apple.com/safari for both the Mac OS X operating system and Microsoft Windows.

"Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in the statement. "And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

The browser's Mac OS X version requires a system running either Mac OS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger v 10.4.11 with at least 256 MB of memory. The Windows version requires Windows XP or Vista and 256 MB of memory and a 500 MHz processor.