If you downloaded Apple’s new Web browser Safari when it was first released last week, check the Web site again — Apple has released a new public beta version, v51. While Apple doesn’t provide specific details about what’s changed in the new build, it recommends the new version for all Safari users.
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Billed as “the turbo browser for Mac OS X,” Safari is Apple’s solution to a long-standing problem: The slow speed of Web browsing on Mac OS X. Safari uses open standards and has ties to Linux: It is based on KHTML and KJS software from the KDE open source project.
Apple’s own benchmarks show that Safari is 40 percent faster that Microsoft Internet Explorer when it comes to launching, and for page rendering times, there’s no comparison: Apple’s tests show that Safari is three times faster there.
Safari also features built-in searching using the popular Google engine; a Snapback feature that automatically returns you to a site’s home page, a new way of handling bookmarks, Rendezvous, support for the latest Internet standards and much more.
Safari is available for download from Apple’s Web site now. Safari requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later, but Apple says it works best with Mac OS X 10.2.3.
Apple also noted that more than 500,000 users have downloaded Safari since its release on January 7, 2003.
An article posted to Apple’s Knowledge Base Web site notes the problems that this beta update fixes: under certain circumstances, the original release of Safari could delete a symbolic link to the /tmp file. As a result, some users could see the following problems:
Apple said that the new v51 version available for download from Apple’s Web site corrects these issues. Instructions are also provided for how to recover from the problem without downloading the new beta — visit the KnowledgeBase document for further instructions.
MacCentral has updated this story with details about what fixes are present in the new beta version .