After a bit of hesitation, Apple released a major update to its WebKit-based Safari browser on Monday. Safari 5 for Windows and Mac comes with several big feature announcements. There's the new Reader option for streamlining articles reading, broader support for HTML5, default support for searches on Bing, and performance improvements. However, the biggest new feature of them all--extensions--won't be available until later this summer, and depending on what you're looking for in a browser, Safari can be seen as lacking many helpful options.

The official late summer street date for the extensions leaves many questions up for debate. Apple has said the new framework restricts which extensions can be installed to those that have been approved by Apple. It's not clear at this time if or how that system will be different from the add-on networks supported by Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox, but given Apple's heavy hand in content control on the newly renamed iOS it's not unreasonable to expect the company to take that approach as well with Safari extensions.

Apple has created a Safari Developer Program to guide, and perhaps curate, extension development, and to that end has allowed users to toggle on the extensions menu. If you go to the Advanced tab under Preferences, at the bottom of the menu there's a check box to force the Develop menu to appear on the menu bar. If you don't see the menubar on Windows, you can activate it by hitting the Alt key or force it to appear via the Show Menu Bar option at the top of the general settings window.

In the Develop menu, click on Enable Extensions. The next time you return to the Preferences window, you should see an Extensions tab. To install an extension, go to one of the unofficial Safari Extensions collections, download an extension, extract the .safariextz file, and double-click on it. The extension will then load in the extension manager. Most extensions currently available are ported from Google Chrome, since both browsers share the same rendering engine.

The most interesting new feature in Safari is the Reader button. This button appears at the right side of the location bar when you load a site with pagination, such as a multipage article or gallery. Hitting it will open an overlay window that combines all pages into a single, scrollable format and tints out the site beneath, including ads and other distractions. Any embedded pictures or videos remain viewable, although like the text of the story they lose their site-specific formatting in favor of the Reader. Reader also comes with five buttons at the bottom of the frame that appear only when you mouse over them. You can zoom in, zoom out, e-mail the page, or print the page in its Reader format.

Reader is a more limited version of the code used in the Readability bookmarklet. What's innovative about the Safari version is that Apple decided to include it at all, but because it's such an obvious feature to include in a Web browser it wouldn't be surprising to see others follow suit. Hopefully, Apple will expand the sharing feature beyond e-mail so you can immediately share an article on Twitter or Facebook.

HTML5 gets a lot of love in Safari 5, pushing the browser to the top of the list of HTML5 browser versions that aren't in beta or development. Safari now supports HTML5-based full-screen video playback, video closed captioning, geolocation, drag and drop, forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, EventSource, and WebSocket. But in an odd turn from Apple, their HTML5 demo Web site is restricted to Safari browsers only.

Safari now does come with local searches enabled from the location bar, so as you type your query you can see how it relates to your history and bookmarks. However, there's still no location bar-based Web search, something that Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have had for varying but lengthy amounts of time. Safari has also added Bing search to its default search engine options, but again, its competitors have allowed full search engine customization for a long time.

Although its search abilities may not be up to par with the competition, Safari has begun to introduce a modicum of tab customization. The Tab window in Preferences gives you far more customizations than before, including opening into a new tab, some control over the tab focus on new tabs, and confirmation before closing multiple tabs. Safari 5 does not offer a session manager. It also doesn't natively respect your default browser for opening links. To change this, you'll need to go to the General tab under Preferences and change the default Web browser setting.

These deficiencies certainly won't kill Safari, but they're odd ones to leave out.

Safari's performance has definitely been improved, and it remains the browser's strongest selling point. Part of that is due to the hardware acceleration (only in the Windows version, read more about hardware acceleration here) and DNS prefetching. Part of that is because of the improvements made to the Nitro JavaScript engine.

On a Windows 7 x86, running on an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 at 2.53 GHz, with 3GB of RAM, Safari notched an average of 465.5 milliseconds over three cold-boot runs on the SunSpider JavaScript test. The current stable version of Chrome released today, version 5.0.375.70, scored 525.19 ms. The disparity between the Mac versions was far greater. On a Mac OS X 10.6.3, running on the same Intel chip as the Windows 7 computer but with 4GB of RAM, Safari 5 completed the SunSpider tests in 351.7 ms. Google Chrome took 498.67 ms. While the developer's version of Chrome comes in at 356.9 ms on the Windows 7 computer, indicating that Safari's benchmarks can be not only achieved but surpassed, Safari's the only stable public version with these numbers.

Speed is important, but it's not the only judge of a good browser. With the exception of the unique Reader feature, Safari 5 does more to bring Apple's browser into line with other browsers than actually forging any new ground, and even with the improvements made to this version Safari still lacks many of the small but useful features competitors offer. For raw JavaScript speed, Safari is at the head of the pack for now, but Apple's focus on other user needs is remains less than exemplary.

Also see: How to use Safari's new Reader, Safari 5 crashing at launch, Netflix streaming videos not working with Safari 5

I've definitely come to rely on Google's turn-by-turn voice navigation to guide me through some twists and turns of California's coastline. Starting Wednesday, Canadians and some Europeans will similarly be able to ditch their satnav systems and fire up their Android phones instead.

Google Maps 4.2 with Navigation will pop into the Android Market apps in Canada, and in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland--as long as your smartphone runs 1.6 of the Android operating system or higher.

That's not all the localization love Google has in store. Those who speak French, German, Italian, and Spanish will likewise get a chance to try out a beta version of Google Search that's activated by your voice. However, Google warns that its localizations are limited to one-country language models, so the app's digital ears may falter in interpreting Mexican-inflected Spanish, Swiss-German, and Caribbean French, for instance.

Voice search that recognizes Spanish, Italian, German, and French is now available for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia Series 60 smartphones.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

With all the excitement this week surrounding the announcement of the iPhone 4, it almost seemed like an afterthought that Safari 5 became available on the same day. In fact, Steve Jobs didn't even mention the major update during his keynote speech at the World Wide Developers Conference. But we've had a chance to check out the latest features for Apple's flagship Web browser, and we're impressed with most everything Apple has done.

Check out our First Look video for Safari 5 (Windows | Mac) to get the lowdown on the new Safari Reader, HTML5 improvements, Safari Extensions, and more.

Mozilla published a second release candidate for the next build of Thunderbird on Wednesday. Judging from the public bug list, only one critical bug kept Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 from becoming the final build of the current branch, code-named Lanikai.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this second release candidate fixes one critical bug on Macs, one major bug on all platforms, and three ''normal'' priority bugs. The now-fixed Mac bug had caused the open-source e-mail client to crash, and then crash again on subsequent launchings. The cross-platform, major-level bug repaired a settings migration assistant problem where the tool didn't recognize advanced IMAP synchronization settings. The full bug list can be read here.

Thunderbird 3.1 will feature a new migration assistant and new setup wizard, saved files manager similar to Firefox's Download Manager, quick filter toolbar, and faster search results. Assuming no other critical bugs are discovered, the final release of Thunderbird 3.1 can be expected on schedule for sometime in the next week.

With Microsoft's Office Web Apps out in the wild, I thought it was time to try to test their limits.

For a while now, Microsoft has said that the experience on the iPhone would be similar to that in other mobile browsers--allowing document viewing, but not the editing and other features found in the full Web Apps.

Through some work, though, I managed to get the iPad to try to open up the full Office Web Apps. By clicking around various pages within Windows Live, I found some that had an option to click to switch to the "PC version" of the site. Doing so, and then navigating back to the Office tab allowed me to see what I could and could not force the iPad to do. I was unable to create and edit a new Word, PowerPoint, or OneNote document, but did manage to create and edit a basic Excel spreadsheet, even getting it to perform a simple calculation. (Four Web Apps minus three that don't work equals one that does.)

Now, again, creating and editing Office documents on an iPad is not supported, so it's not surprising it doesn't really work in the mobile version of Safari. That said, with iPads flying off the shelves, it probably should be a supported browser. And Microsoft might want to rethink that decision not to create native apps for the iPhone and iPad as well.

If things at the recent D: All Things Digital conference are any indication, the technorati are moving quickly to the iPad and this seems like a crowd that the Office team can ill afford to lose as customers. It makes sense to invest in Windows Phone, but if I were running Office, I wouldn't want to bet my business on it.

For the record, here's the list of officially supported browsers for the full Web Apps: Internet Explorer 7 and 8; Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Safari 4 on Mac; and Google's Chrome. (Microsoft originally said it wouldn't guarantee they would work in Chrome, but appears to have changed its mind.)

Windows Live opens the mobile (view-only) versions of the Web Apps when using Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 or later; Safari 4 on iPhone 3G or 3GS; BlackBerry 4 and later; Nokia S60, NetFront 3.4, 3.5, and later; Opera Mobile 8.65 and later; and Openwave 6.2, 7.0, and later.

Other desktop browsers aren't blocked by the Web Apps, but aren't fully supported either, so it's use at your own risk.

Of note, Windows Live was unable to create a new Office document at all using Internet Explorer 6, instead giving me a message that "Windows Live is designed for you, but maybe not for your browser." Oddly, the error message suggested that IE 6 was sufficient for Windows Live (which it is, just not for the Web Apps part).

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Two of the best new and improved features in Photoshop CS5 are the new content-aware fill feature and the overhauled high-dynamic range tools. Available in both Photoshop CS5 basic (Windows | Mac) and Photoshop CS5 Extended (Windows | Mac), the two tools enhance features that Photoshop has already had in ways that make them more useful and easier to use.

In the first video, we cover how to use the content-aware feature to remove both small objects, such as telephone wires, and large objects, such as an entire person.

In the second video, we go over the massive changes made to the high-dynamic range merging tool, and spotlight the new HDR-toning tool for giving pictures than HDR look without having to take multiple exposures.

Whether you're a Photoshop fanatic or a digital photography neophyte, these How Tos will ensure that you get the most out of Adobe's expensive flagship program.

A few months back I briefly previewed Frogman, which, with its dazzling 3D graphics and comic-book-inspired storyline, came across as a kind of Frogger, Extreme Makeover Edition.

Somewhere along the way, the developer did a bit of gene splicing and turned Frogman into Banzai Rabbit. I'm not sure why--maybe Konami didn't like the similarities--but it doesn't matter. Frog, rabbit, terrier--the core game is the same, and it's awesome.

Rather than waste a lot of words describing Banzai Rabbit, I'll just invite you to watch the demo video. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Cool, right? The game literally starts out as a comic book, then leaps off the page for street-level action. As in Frogger, you have to jump from one side to the other, avoiding traffic and other dangers along the way.

When you rescue the citizen-in-distress on the other side, the camera pans around 180 degrees, and you make a return trip. It's a very clever, very seamless way to keep the action moving.

Unlike Frogger, Banzai Rabbit doesn't keep you hopping on the same dull street. The game features a whopping 34 locations, including train yards, factories, and sewers. It also adds power-ups (like Slow Motion and Super Jump) to keep things interesting.

The icing on the carrot cake? Banzai Rabbit looks absolutely gorgeous, a comic-book-colored 3D feast for the eyes. It's challenging, too, especially once you get past the first few levels. This is no hop in the park!

It is, however, loads of fun, and well worth the $2.99 price of admission. Banzai Rabbit is a must-have for Frogger fans and anyone who likes platform-style arcade action.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Google pushed out an update for the stable branch of its Chrome browser Wednesday. The update, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, addresses multiple security bugs including nine tagged as high-level problems.

The high-level security bugs included cross-origin bypass in DOM methods that netted a security researcher $2,000 in Google's ongoing bug-hunting contest, a memory error in table layouts that earned another researcher $500, holes in the wall of the sandbox on Linux computers, HTML5-based geolocation events firing even after the relevant document had been deleted, and multiple memory errors.

This is the first security-fixing release for the stable branch of Google Chrome since the stable versions for Mac and Linux were announced. The full changelog can be read here.

Update, 1:32 p.m. PST: Google also updated the developer's build of Chrome later in the day. Chrome dev version 6.0.427.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux is a fairly minor update that fixes a bug on all platforms that prevented previews from being seen in empty form fields when the autofill profile was in focus. Linux users saw two bugs on their platform get fixed, one that allowed tracebacks from Paypal.com and another that crashed the browser.

Google also acknowledged two potential causes for recent developer's build crashes on all platforms, but has yet to issue a fix for them. Chrome dev crashes when canceling synchronization sign-in, and when clicking the Save button in the AutoFill Profiles window. Because this is the developer's build, and the least stable of the three "official" builds for Chrome, users should not be surprised by buggy behavior.