News.blog: Apple releases Safari 3.1

Apple on Tuesday announced that version 3.1 of its Safari browser is available for both Mac and Windows users.

The Web browser now supports a number of new Web standards: HTML 5's latest audio and video tags, as well as CSS Animations. Apple claims that page load times in Safari 3.1 are 1.9 times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Mozilla's Firefox 2, and that JavaScript runs as much as six times faster in the new Safari than in other browsers.

Apple offers Safari as a free download. The browser, in its Safari 3.0 iteration, was first made available to Windows users last June.

In order to run Safari 3.1, Mac users will need to be using the Mac OS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.11 operating systems; Windows users will need to be running Windows XP or Windows Vista.