Strong rumors are floating around revealing that Apple is getting ready to launch Safari 5 and Mac OS X 10.6.4 at the WWDC, on coming Monday. While 10.6.4 should be an update geared towards stability and compatibility improvements, the new version of Safari should carry a lot of new features. Among the new features, there is also a mysterious  addition, “Safari Reader” which seems to extract all the useful content of a page to make reading more comfortable. The Reader functionality should be similar to what Instapaper already does: extracting text from an article and render it in a clutter free page. Other improvements should include a 25% faster Javascript execution, improved HTML5 support and new development tools. Something that already offer some services such as readability.

The list of new features for Safari 5 is long and full of surprises. Announced many times earlier, the arrival of Bing that would be added to the list of search engines, in addition to Google and Yahoo already present in Safari 4 is confirmed.

Safari also improves on many other issues: the links will open in a new tab instead of a separate window, looking for web addresses in the URL field based on that of competing browsers (it will show the links stored in your bookmarks and history in the present), private browsing should be highlighted with an icon to switch between the window and the Top Sites of history will be more convenient, while engine should be improved, particularly in the management of the cache. For users of Safari on Windows, Apple announced supportfor hardware acceleration.

Important to note is that in the release notes received, there is no mention of support for extensions, the Firefox or Chrome.

[Via 9To5Mac]