Apple released Safari 5 yesterday.

Being a software developer as long as I’ve been, I know better than to get the 5.0 release — wait for the inevitable 5.0.1. 🙂

But I’ve been having so many problems with Safari lately (I think more due to the websites visited than Safari itself, e.g. Facebook) I figured what the hey. I needed to reboot my machine anyways, the Safari 5 install would require a reboot, so might as well.

So far I’m pleased with the update. Rendering of pages is a lot faster than with Safari 4. The new “reader” feature is pretty spiffy, like Quick Look for a multi-page web story. It makes the text bigger, more readable, better layout, no ads. That it’s more readable is certainly a big win. I’m sure I’ll be using this feature more and more as I get used to it being there.

There are finally “extensions” for Safari. I’ll be curious to see what people come up with.