Apple’s new Safari 5 Web browser, which has recently been released for both Mac and PC platforms, has been much hyped as the fastest browser – it supposedly loads Web pages at a much quicker pace than rival browsers, and also adds more HTML 5 support.

The most prominent feature of the Safari 5 is the ad blocking feature – the “Safari Reader” mode – which strips any “article”-like Web page off ads and other non-essential design elements; so as to enable the users to focus at the text.

In addition, Apple had implemented two more techniques in Safari 5 for speeding up Web browsing, namely – ‘domain prefetching,’ which finds beforehand addresses for links on the page a user is on; and ‘improved page caching’, which accelerates loading of pages that have already been visited by a user. Moreover, the browser also boasts the stepping up of graphics hardware to smooth rich media.

Some other significant features of the Safari 5 include – search options and extensions; the addition of Microsoft Bing search engine option; bookmarking functionality; RSS reader; vivid new-tab page; as well as support for full-screen HTML 5 video and location-based services.

As per Apple claims, the updated Nitro JavaScript engine of Safari 5 runs JavaScript “30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.”