Since the release of Safari, its usage share has been steadily climbing. According to Net Applications, Safari's marketshare for September 2008 was 6.65%.

Features

Safari offers most features common to modern web browsers. In addition, some of these features are implemented in distinctive ways, while it also includes some unique to the browser:

• A tabbed browsing interface that allows dragging tabs to reorder them, moving them between windows or creating new windows
• A bookmark management scheme reminiscent of the iTunes jukebox software
• A resizable web-search box in the toolbar. This uses Google on the Mac and either Google or Yahoo! on Windows
• Pop-up ad blocking
• History and bookmark search including search of content in history pages
• As-you-type text search
• Spell-checking for all text entry fields
• Expandable text entry boxes, which can be resized by the user to make entering long texts easier
• Automatic filling in of web forms
• Built-in password management via Keychain
• Functionality for subscribing to and reading web feeds
• Quartz-style font-smoothing, even on Windows
• Integration of Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology
• Support for user-specified style sheets
• The Web Inspector, a DOM Inspector-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object Model of a web page
• A high level of standards compliance through its use of the WebKit framework, including partial, preliminary support for CSS3 and HTML 5

CSS support

Safari features full support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), including partial support of CSS3. Safari 3 supports several experimental properties like text-shadow, text-stroke, box-shadow, border-image, multiple backgrounds for each element, resizeable elements, rgba() and the CSS3 pseudo-element :first-of-type.

History and development

Until 1997, Apple Macintosh computers had shipped with Netscape Navigator only, competing with Internet Explorer 2.x and 3. Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac was subsequently included as the default web browser as part of the five year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. However, Netscape Navigator continued to be included. Microsoft released three major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac that were bundled with the OS, with the last one, Internet Explorer 5 being released on March 27, 2000.

On January 7, 2003, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed their own web browser based on KHTML rendering engine, called Safari. They released the first beta version that day and a number of official and unofficial beta versions followed, until version 1.0 was released on June 23, 2003. Available as a separate download initially, it was included with the Mac OS X v10.3 release on October 24, 2003, as the default browser, with Internet Explorer for Mac included only as an alternative browser. Since the release of Mac OS X v10.4 in April 29, 2005, Safari is the only web browser included with the operating system.