Safari 5 may be vital surprise addition to WWDC lineup

Rumor has it that Safari 5 could be the “one more thing” in Steve Jobs’ forthcoming WWDC keynote address, playing the role of the announcement that no one saw coming beforehand but which leaves everyone abuzz afterwards. PC World says the fifth iteration of Apple’s web browser could surface with features largely centered around making the internet faster, with evolved HTML 5 elements thrown in for good measure along with something called Safari Reader for those who’d rather use RSS than the real internet. That Apple would jump straight to the “5.0″ moniker after having invested so little time in evolving Safari 4 (which still rests at version 4.05 and has seen no real change since its introduction) is a mild surprise, but Apple does have a history of jumping to the next whole number as a way of promoting a product at a crucial time, even if the changes to the product aren’t major; in another instance Apple moved its iTunes software to version “5.0″ without major fanfare simply because it had released nine separate versions of iTunes 4.x and had literally run out of numbers.

Our guess is that the single biggest push behind Safari 5 will center around the inclusion of the Bing search engine in the toolbar, as Apple’s impending adoption of Microsoft’s search engine has widely been rumored as Apple attempts to distance itself from rival Google.

While any judgment on Safari 5 would have to wait until it sees the light of day, it’s worth pointing out that Safari 4′s most ambitious feature, the immersion of tabbed browsing into the title bar of the browser window itself, was such a disaster that it never made it out of the public beta phase and was gone by the time the official Safari 4.0 release surfaced. If Safari 5 is released on Monday, it would mean that Apple has decided to forego any public beta process this time around.

Another possible reason for the sudden emphasis on Safari could be that while the browser has been cross platform for a couple years now, Apple has not made a significant public push to get the browser adopted by Windows users. With the perpetually half-finished Firefox even Google’s half-baked Chrome browser easily chewing marketshare away from Internet Explorer of late, it could be that Apple has finally decided to get serious about pushing Safari as a cross platform web browser as opposed to its current practice of offering a Windows version of Safari but seemingly hoping that that fact remains a secret.