Apple has introduced Safari 3.1 claiming it to be the world's fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs.
Safari 3.1 loads web pages 1.9-times faster than IE7 and 1.7-times faster than Firefox 2, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Philip Schiller says.
``And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.''
Safari 3.1 is available as a free download at www.apple.com/nz/safari
It was the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS animations.
The new browser required MacOS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor.
Safari 3.1 for Windows requires Windows XP or Vista, a minimum of 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 Mhz Intel Pentium processor.
Microsoft, on the same day, released its Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) which could be downloaded by the Windows Update or Microsoft Download centre.
Windows platform marketing manager David Rayner said the SP1 pack was a response to customer feedback and brought improvements to specific security, reliability and performance issues, as well as providing support for new types of hardware and several emerging standards.
``Today, Windows Vista is compatible with close to 80,000 devices, applications and components through Windows Update, more than twice the number supported when the product was released.''
Vista had fewer vulnerabilities than XP in its first 12 months on the market and was the most secure and reliable operating system Microsoft had produced, Mr Rayner said.
