Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers

In addition to its alleged blazing speed Apple has also made a leap forward with its support for HTML 5 audio and video tags. HTML 5 is still years away from being an approved W3C spec and the audio and video tagging mechanism (which is essentially a new variant of an <embed> tag) is still the subject of debate.

Safari 3.1 also supports CSS animations - which also are not yet widely supported (if at all) in the broader web community. That said, someone has to be first in supporting HTML 5 specifications, though I suspect that at this early stage we'll just end up with multiple implementations of the same spec with Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft all favoring their own implementation.

As for the claim of the 'World's Fastest Browser' ?

Well, it's no secret that IE is slow and that Firefox 2.x is a memory hog. So Apple may (and I stress the word 'may' ) well be correct. Then again Firefox 3 is rounding third and nearly done - boasting tremendous speed and performance improvements.

While speed and functionality are the headliners for Safari 3.1, Apple has also plugged a number of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaws in the new browser release. I guess you can be fast AND secure.