Apple rang in this Tuesday morning with a Safari 3.1 announcement for both Mac and Windows, which the company claims "loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2." (No thanks to those hidden APIs? *cough*) Apple also claims that Safari 3.1 is capable of running JavaScript "up to six times faster" than other browsers. The company even provided this handy performance graph:



Graphs courtesy of Apple

(Turns out the browser performance was measured on a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac running Leopard Windows XP and 1GB of RAM, along with a ATI Radeon HD 2600 with 256MB of VRAM, and JavaScript results were based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0's default settings. Edit: Apple's Safari site says the iMac is running Leopard, while the PDF where these graphs come from say Windows XP. Tricky tricky.)

But what does it really do? Turns out Safari 3.1 now supports CSS animations, CSS web fonts, and HTML 5 media support, improved SVG support, and HTML 5's offline storage support. Offline storage, of course, is something like Google Gears that allows the browser to serve up web pages and other data locally without having to access the Internet. It's pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing. The updated Safari also contains a smattering of security updates.

Check out the entire changelog and product overview document (PDF) to read more about what's in Safari 3.1, which is available for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.11) and up, as well as Windows XP and Vista. (Note, by the way, that Safari is finally out of its perma-beta state for Windows.) Download and install at your own risk, as always, but we have a few Ars staffers who have already taken the plunge without any adverse results. Let us know what you think in the comments.