Back in 2007, Apple introduced the Safari mobile as the default web browser used on the Apple’s iPhone. This is a mobile web browser that runs on Apple’s iOS operating system. Until now it dominates about 53 percent market share for mobile devices and tablets. That is 30 percent higher than its main competitor, Opera Mini.
The success of Safari mobile version cannot be separated from the popularity of Apple products on the market, such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. All of three mobile devices used mobile Safari mobile operating system as their default browser.
This is the first mobile browser to display mobile Web pages that is almost identical to the display on a desktop computer but amazingly without reducing its usability. Instead of displaying web pages in the same format as desktop PC, the previous version of this mobile browser was often providing the limited web viewing and incorrect formatting.
This mobile browser has a good capability of loading web pages both in landscape and in horizontal view. The iPhone’s accelerometer feature brings the quick switch between the two by simply switching the phone.
The specific features of Safari enabled in iOS are the bookmarking links to particular pages as "Web Clip" icons on the Home screen, MDI-style browsing (with up to 8 pages open at once, limited by cache storage), opening specially-designed pages in full-screen mode, pressing on an image for 3 seconds to save it to the photo album and support for HTML5 new input types.
There are new features in iOS v.4.2 such as find feature built into search box and the ability to print the current webpage using AirPrint. The updated features in iOS 4.3 are integration of the Nitro JavaScript engine for faster page loads (but only available to iPhone 3GS, 3rd Generation iPod Touch, iPad and above).
In iOS 5, Safari will has features such as true tabbed browsing (similar to the desktop experience, only for the iPad and iPad 2), reading list (a bookmarking feature that allows tagging of certain sites for reading later), and reader (a reading feature that can format text and images from a web page into a more readable format, similar to a PDF document).
The reason why users love Safari is because the iPhone’s touch screen makes the zooming task efficient and easy. The popular pinch-zoom in and out feature makes zooming in on specific areas easy and fun. Unfortunately, there is limitation in this mobile browser i.e. it does not come with the Adobe Flash 9 support that causes the web loading slower. This can be a major consideration of the users as some of the most popular websites on the internet rely heavily upon Adobe Flash support.
The latest desktop version is the Safari 5.1.7 that comes with improvements to performance, stability, compatibility, and security. There will be some changes that will improve the browser's responsiveness when the system is low on memory and fix an issue that could affect websites using forms to authenticate users. [IS]
