Apple has rolled out release 5 of Safari Technology Preview via Mac App Store to OS X users. The new release contains a couple of bug fixes along with improvements focused on JavaScript, CSS, Web APIs, Web Inspector, Media, Security, Networking and Accessibility.
Safari Technology Preview is Apple’s equivalent of a Chrome or Firefox dev version. Apple intends to push advances in their WebKit rendering engine early to developers through the Preview and get feedback in return. At the moment, the Preview supports ECMAScript 6, B3 JavaScript JIT compiler, latest version of Shadow DOM, Improved IndexedDB implementation and more.
With these advancements in WebKit, the Preview outperforms Chrome (stable version) as well as Chrome Canary by reaching a score of 19090. In comparison, stable Chrome and Chrome Canary scored 17214 and 15539 respectively. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt though since they are rarely an accurate representation of real world performance where Chrome simply outshines its competitors.
Users can download and run Safari Technology Preview along with the stable version of Safari on their Macs. Unlike the Webkit nightlies, users get complete iCloud integration (reading list, favorites, synced tabs etc) with the Preview so they can test it out as their daily driver too.
The complete release notes of release 5 are available here. You can download and try it for yourself from Apple’s website.
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