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Apple releases Safari 6 with offline reading for OS X 10.7 Lion

For those with OS X 10.7 Lion who aren't ready to upgrade to Wednesday's release of Mountain Lion, Safari 6 is now available for download, though a Windows version of Safari 6 remains absent.

Safari 6 for Lion can be downloaded through Software Update in OS X. New features of Safari 6 highlighted by Apple include:

  • Smart Search Field. Safari now has one field for typing both searches and Web addresses.
  • Offline Reading List. Safari saves entire webpages in your Reading List so you can catch up on your reading even when you don't have an Internet connection.
  • Do Not Track. Safari can send the websites you visit a request not to track you online.
  • Password pane. Manage your saved website logins with the new Password pane.
  • Baidu. The leading Chinese search engine Baidu is now a built-in option for Chinese users.

In addition to new features, Safari 6 for OS X Lion also includes improvements to stability, compatibility, usability, and security. These changes:

  • Make the swipe to navigate gesture work with PDFs.
  • Restore the state of Reading List when Safari is launched.
  • Fix an issue that affected full screen video in webpages that have positioned content.
  • Restore the user's previous cookies after Private Browsing without requiring a Safari relaunch.

The last update to Safari, version 5.1.7, arrived for Lion users in May. It automatically disabled old versions of Adobe's Flash player that don't have the most up-to-date security features.

Safari for Windows was not updated on Wednesday, but version 5.1.7 remains available for download from Apple's site.