Using Apple’s Safari browser, the revolutionary new iPhone is able to render web pages on your iPhone just the way you can render web pages on your MAC or PC-based Safari browser. The current version of Safari available on the iPhone is 2.0, but an upgrade is in the making, with version 3.0 available in the near future.
Safari is an Apple-developed Web Browser, which was primarily designed to replace Netscape as the default MAC OS browser. It was first released on January 7, 2003, with an announcement made by Steve Jobs stating that Apple’s upper management strongly supported the Safari browser platform.
At its core, Safari uses WebKit for rendering web pages and can run JavaScript. Safari was also released as an Open License Software under GNU Lesser General Public License.
Initially Safari was designed to run only on MAC computers, but in June, 2007 a Windows-based version was released. At about the same time, the iPhone was announced as a smart phone device running a version of the Safari browser.
What can we do with Safari on iPhone?
The iPhone’s Safari browser can consume RSS and Atom feeds; the browser supports private browsing sessions (a mode in which personal information is not recorded by the web browser.) Using the iPhone and the Safari browser, we can also archive and email web pages, search bookmarks and everything else a standard web browser provides. It’s important to note that the Safari is the first browser to pass Acid2 testing. This testing allows the highlighting of problems on web pages that don’t display correctly. In other words, “The Acid2 test should render correctly on any browser that follows W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications,” according to Apple technical documents.
Despite all of its built in capabilities, early reviews of iPhone by the end-users have detected some problems rendering certain web pages on the Safari browser. We’ll have to see how realistic Apple’s claims of a full-featured browser experience using the iPhone are.
Many experts predict that Apple’s “open source code” policy, along with the increasing popularity of the iPhone, will lead to its browser being targeted by hackers. Stay tuned.