Safari Public Beta 2.0 Due Soon, Apple Quietly Seeds v69, v71

On March 23, members of Apple's Safari Software Seeding beta program received an email from Apple informing them that the Safari beta program had seen its last seeding. "Due to Safari 67 postings to the Internet, we have closed the Safari Seed project," the memo read, in part. "We know that the majority of you are not responsible for the leaks to the Internet, and we sincerely appreciate your feedback, time and effort with this project."

On Thursday, March 27th Apple pressed on with development of the the company's self-branded web-browser, privately seeding beta 69, and on April 4th, beta 71. A shinny new build of Safari (beta 72) is expected to be seeded to internal staff and testers later today, if it has not been posted already.

The focus for the remainder of the Safari 1.0 beta program is to ameliorate the stability and performance of the browser for release as part of Apple's forthcoming update to Mac OS X. Beta 69 marked the appearance of one noticeably new function under the Safari application menu entitled "Reset Safari." "Resetting Safari erases your browsing history, empties the cache, clears the Downloads window, and removes cookies. It also removes any saved names and passwords or other AutoFill text and clears Google search entries," reads the confirmation window. The only other recognizable change to the build was an updated AutoFill button that lies in the button bar.

Safari beta 71 marked no noticeable cosmetic alterations or feature additions, but does sport noticeable optimization improvements. For starters, the development team has compressed the browser 3.1 Megabytes in size with beta 71, recoiling the application from 14.2 MB down to 11.1. In distribution form, this leaves the browser just under a 4 MB download.

More notably, however, Safari beta 71 marks the beginning of what Apple is calling Safari 1.0 Beta 2, in preparation for the second public seeding of Safari due out any day now.

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