Yesterday, Apple released Safari 5.0, a really fantastic update to the popular Mac browser. A few key additions include: a reader mode for browsing article style content, much improved developer tools, and support for extensions.
Googles Chrome browser is now out of beta for Windows, Linux and Mac, and uses the same render engine as Safari (webkit), which makes building cross browser compatible websites a lot easier. In general, websites look identical in Safari and Chrome, so the end users choice is more about what else the browser offers. Chrome has a larger extension library, a more integrated search, etc. Safari has more integration with the Apple ecosystem, bookmark syncing to iPhone, etc.
Firefox isn’t left in the dust either, 4.0 is around the corner, and 3.6 is the best build to date, and while it uses a different render engine (Gecko), websites generally look the same as they do with webkit based browsers, with a lot of support for the new CSS3 specs and HTML5.
Of course the giant elephant in the room is Internet Explorer, which has a publicly available preview of IE9, and is now catching up and supporting CSS3 specs such as drop shadow and rounded corners, and will likely bring with it some of the nice features introduced in IE8 such as web slices, which are something kind of in between a widget and extension.
This is not only great news for developers, but for end users as well. Users will now have multiple choices on how to experience the web, and on the desktop, all of them seem to be good ones.
