Tonight, Apple released Safari version 5.0. Our initial impressions are of enormous speed gains where regards the browser’s performance when using Safari 5 with VoiceOver.

The latest version of Apple’s popular web browser features the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, and the ability to choose between Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac OS X and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

Safari 5 is available via Mac OS X’s "Software Update" mechanism.