Today’s update of Safari 5.0.1  will bring in the all new Extensions  to the speedy browser.

Though the extensions gallery choices are limited, at the moment, there are some amazing ones already available including an official Twitter extension.

Extensions Gallery

Beyond Twitter, Safari Extensions get some love from the following:

• The New York Times
• Amazon
• Ebay

Safari 5 also features Safari Reader that displays multipage articles into one page reading, fast Nitro JavaScript engine and HTML5 compliant.

Safari is now faster than Chrome 5 (stable) and feels as Good as Opera, but with extensions coming, Safari already looks best browser on Mac OS, and may be on windows too in some time in future.

Related: IE9 vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera Performance

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WebKit2′s aims to bake both “split process model” and a non-blocking API into the WebKit product—and by extension into Safari and any other client which takes advantage of the WebKit2 framework.  This means that when a bad plugin or a bug in the renderer causes an error, only that tab (at max) will crash instead of the entire browser.

In fact, IE8 has a similar system (I know you’re surprised) and unfortunately Firefox is still beta-testing it with Electrolysis. Apple had long complained about the unstable or as Steve Jobs calls it “Buggy” Flash implementation on Mac OS. the issue was partially handled in Safari 4 where flash crash didn’t crash the browser itself. Taking a step further, WebKit2 split processes directly into the rendering engine and separates each plugin and its instance to separate processes.

Another goal of WebKit2 is to implement the API to the framework in a completely non-blocking manner. This means that developers can hook into API methods with various kinds of callbacks in order to receive notifications from WebKit views.

WebKit2 would accelerate the page loading a typical web page. While the renderer is rendering something, the main application loop (some javascript) can move on to doing something else as requested by a user.

Basically, this is achieved using 3 techniques:

1. Notification-style client callbacks,
2. Policy-style client callbacks, and
3. policy settings.

The detail is available on the project page.

What does this means for All WebKit based Browsers?

Apple has done something that would help every webkit-based browser out there. Now this is something way better than what Google has done with Chrome, where the system is closed, benefits cannot be leveraged in other browsers.

WebKit2 is currently available on Windows and OS X– Obviously the two platforms Apple supports its Safari browser. Linux support is not mentioned at this time and I see no reasons why Apple would port it, but the Open source community will, eventually.

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As usual, Safari was the first to fall, followed by IE 8, then was Firefox on Windows 7 x64 and iPhone’s mobile Safari. Google Chrome, however, is the last man standing.

Charlie Miller, the first hacker to take safari down, says that Chrome is still the hardest one to exploit.

“There are bugs in Chrome but they’re very hard to exploit. I have a Chrome vulnerability right now but I don’t know how to exploit it. It’s really hard. They’ve got that sandbox model that’s hard to get out of. With Chrome, it’s a combination of things – you can’t execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox.”

The mobile Safari attack was particularly impressive, since running code on the iPhone requires a valid digital signature. By rearranging bits of pre-signed code, Halvar Flake of Zynamics was able to deliver a malicious payload via Safari and force the iPhone to cough up its complete SMS database. Contacts and messages were laid bare — including deleted ones.

“Nils”, for the 2nd year in a row, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox to take complete control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. He used several tricks to bypass Address Space Layout Randomization (ALSR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to get his drive-by download to load an executable on the target machine.

Normally, ASLR+DEP are held up as significant roadblocks to thwart malware attacks on the newest versions of Windows but, as this contest shows, skilled hackers with enough motivation and resources can bypass those mitigations easily.

Conclusions?

Most of these exploits aren’t being used on the internet, it’s still an indication of just how scary the landscape of the Internet is right now. How do you stay safe? Google Chrome looks like a good choice, obviously, but there’s another option you might consider: Opera. Opera has relatively small market share and even hackers don’t bother about preparing exploits fro this browser.

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I’m always suspicious of all claims that are along the lines of “world’s blankiest blank,” especially when those claims come from Apple.

So, is Safari 4 the fastest browser? Let’s test out Apple’s claim by pitting it against Google Chrome.

I’m using my standard test bed – QX9770 Core 2 Extreme running at 3.2GHz, with 2GB or RAM on a fully up-to-date Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit platform.

I’m putting Safari 4 against Google Chrome because that’s currently the fastest browser on the block. If Safari 4 can beat that, it earns the title of “world’s fastest browser.” If it can’t beat Chrome, then the claim is puff.

As usual, two tests – SunSpider JavaScript, and V8 benchmarks.

The Results:

While it’s clear that Safari 4 is fast, and it’s almost caught up with Chrome in the V8 benchmark, Safari 4 is clearly NOT the world’s fastest browser.

Benchmark Safari 4 vs. Firefox 3.5 vs. chrome 2.0 vs. Chrome 3.0

Google Chrome still outperforms Safari 4.  The Firefox 3.5 was as bad as 1.6x Slower than Chrome 2.0.

Also, I did some tests with chrome 3.0 with firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.

Ahh, Chrome 3.0 is slick, don’t even look at other browsers Its 1.8x times faster than Firefox 3.5 and 1.35x times faster than Safari 4.