Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday that Safari 4 is now out of beta, and that a massive overhaul is planned for its QuickTime media player.
Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of OS X software, said QuickTime 10 is now "super efficient" and will support HTTP streaming based on h.264 and AAC, a feature that many competing programs have long offered. The new QuickTime will automatically adjust the playback bit rate, and it will be able to stream through firewalls.
In addition to receiving a major version-jump from version 7 to version 10, QuickTime has also had a complete refresh of its interface. For example, the on-screen controls will disappear when playing back video.
Safari 4's Nitro will be the fastest JavaScript engine of any browser on the market, Serlet said. Without describing what kind of benchmarks he was using, he showed the WWDC audience a chart indicating that Chrome 2 is 5.3 times faster than Internet Explorer 8, but that Safari 4 is 7.8 times faster. Safari 4 also loads JavaScript three times faster than Safari on the iPhone, Serlet said.
HTML 5 audio and video tags will be supported in Safari 4, Serlet said.
One new feature in Safari 4 is designed to address the instability that some plug-ins can bring to browsers. "The number-one cause of crashes is browser plug-ins," Serlet said. Mozilla Firefox is the best-known extensible browser.
Crashes in Safari 4 that are caused by a plug-in will cause only the plug-in to fail. Refresh the page, and the plug-in will reload. "All you need to do is reload that page and that's it. You haven't missed a beat," Serlet said.
