"Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

Officially, loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. In addition, the browser runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers.

Last but not least in the pack of goodies, Safari 3.1 is the only surfing software able to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5, CSS Web Fonts and CSS animations.

Safari 3.1 is available immediately as a free download over here. 

The Mac OS X version requires a Mac OS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.11, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire.

Safari 3.1 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.