Late last night, Apple released the latest version of its Safari web-browser, making some fairly interesting changes to the browser and speeding the whole affair up by 30%.

Safari 5's Reader is an interesting piece of kit...

Safari 5 had been one of the releases that had been rumoured Steve Jobs might unveil during the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote speech yesterday evening, but instead the browser went unmentioned at WWDC and was released shortly afterwards. Perhaps most interesting about this release of Safari is that it contains both a few steps forward and at least one noticeable step back.

The big step forward is that Safari now supports extensions, named, appropriately enough, Safari Extensions. The aim is to allow users the ability to ‘customise their browsing experience,’ something that may have swayed them towards browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome. On the subject of Google Chrome, Apple’s big talking point may well be that Safari 5 is fully 30% faster than Safari 4, but the bigger point to take note of will likely be that the new browser is 3% faster than Google’s lightweight affair… which is likely a bit of a feather in Apple’s Webkit cap.

Another of the more interesting new features added to Safari with this update is the Reader, a simple way of displaying content without their original design. This one should be a boon to anyone who reads a blog that tends to be pink-text-on-a-pink-background, displaying the text in simple black on white and niftily enough cutting out the advertising. It’s no InstaPaper, but it does feel somehow like a step in that direction.

As for the noticeable step back, older Safari users may be pleased to hear that the address bar now also serves as a loading bar again.