Safari 1.1 Changes, and future Safari improvements

Safari 1.1, included with Panther, offers a number of improvements over Safari 1.0. If you're curious as to what those specific improvements are, the blog of Dave Hyatt, one of the developers of Safari, provides the details:

1. Better standards support. You'll find fixes for positioning bugs, overflow bugs, floats, tables, gzip support, generated content using ::before and ::after, DHTML. You name it, we've improved it.
   
2. Speed. We're still fast, and we're only going to get faster.
   
3. CSS2 support. In addition to all of the bug fixes to be more standards-compliant, we also added support for CSS2 properties like text-shadow and new display values like inline-block. Try using text-shadow in conjunction with ::selection. It's cool. :)
   
4. Safari on Panther supports rgba values in CSS for specifying border, background, foreground and shadow colors.
   
5. Support for the CSS3 opacity (using -khtml-opacity) property. Make entire blocks and inlines transparent without resorting to transparent PNGs.
   
6. A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the complete XUL box model, including horizontal and vertical boxes, the ability to flex, and the ability to reorder content and reverse content. If you're building canned content that you control using WebKit, you'll find a whole new range of layout possibilities at your disposal. Need to create dynamically sized headers and footers and flexible center content? The XUL box model can do that. Need to center an object within the viewport? The XUL box model can do that too.
   

In addition, another blog entry covers changes made to WebCore (the code used by Safari and other HTML-rendering parts of OS X) since Safari 1.1 was released -- meaning they should be available in a future update.

It remains to be seen if Apple will make Safari 1.1 available to Jaguar (OS X 10.2) users. A number of websites do not work with Safari 1.0 but do work with the updated version.

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