Fri, 10 Aug 2012 Safari 6 review

Offline Reading List

Reading list is a neat feature that enables you to quickly save a web page to a reading list for you to catch up with later. Safari introduces offline functionality to this, caching and saving the page for when you haven’t got an online connection.  

When iOS 6 is introduced Offline Reading List will also be available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch owners. This makes Reading List a much more useful service, because you can quickly browse and add a number of articles and read them when you have time, but no connection (when taking a flight, and so on).

Share button

Sharing via Twitter (and FaceBook in an upcoming Autumn update) is integrated into Mac OS X and can be done directly from Safari using the Share button. This icon with an arrow takes its cue from iOS where are similar icon on the menu has been used to share articles for a while.

But the Share button doesn’t just house Twitter, it also houses Add To Reading List, Add Bookmark, Email, and Message. It’s a handy catch-all area for sharing, taking note, and storing the pages you’re looking at.

Just the one Share by Email option exists now (you used to be able to share the Page or Link). Instead you use the Email option in Safari and choose between Web, Page, or Link from within Safari.  

Unfortunately Apple has removed these commands from the Menu bar structure, and getting rid of the stock menu commands for Share by Email and Bookmarks seems annoyingly obfuscating to us. We imagine many people will struggle to associate saving a bookmark with sharing a webpage. 

Safari 6 Speedtest: Mountain Lion vs Lion

Apple has continued to make improvements to the speed of Safari and our benchmarking tests show that version 6 is, under Mountain Lion, slightly faster than Safari 5.1.7. Under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, however, it seems to run slightly slower. It’s a rather strange step backwards, and although the amounts aren’t huge some Mac OS X Lion users have noticed the drop in performance. Speed is such a big issue in web browsing functionality that we understand any frustration. We find Safari still faster than Firefox, and overall better than Opera. Chrome is probably now Safari’s main consumer competition and our benchmarks show both Safari and Chome deliver faster results in different areas.

See also: Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

Apple has consistently attempted to ensure that Safari remains one of the fastest ways to get information from the web.