Apple Releases Safari 6.1 Seed 6 to Developers

Apple has released Safari 6.1 Seed 6 to developers for testing. Safari 6.1 for Mountain Lion requires OS X 10.8.4. Safari 6.1 for Lion requires Security Update 2013-002.

This pre-release version of Safari includes WebKit enhancements for better text, layout, and accessibility support. It also includes a redesigned Web Inspector with a streamlined toolbar, a new Activity Viewer, and other great tools for building and debugging your website. Please refer to the seed note for more details.

Safari Sidebar

The Safari Sidebar makes it easy to access your Bookmarks, Reading List, and Shared Links. (Shared Links on Mountain Lion only)

Shared Links (Mountain Lion only)
Shared Links shows you links from people you follow on Twitter. You can see who shared the link, as well as the comments they posted about it.

Continuous Reading (Mountain Lion only)
Continuously scroll through all the articles and webpages in your Reading List
and in Shared Links. When you select an item and scroll to its last page, the next item in your list automatically appears below it.

Easy Retweet (Mountain Lion only)
A Retweet button in Shared Links makes it easy to retweet links from people you follow on Twitter.

Redesigned Top Sites
Top Sites has a new look and makes it easier than ever to get to your favorite websites. Rearrange sites by dragging and dropping thumbnails.

Safari Power Saver
Safari conserves energy by playing only the plug-in content that’s front and center on the webpages you browse to. Safari displays a preview of the plug-in content on a webpage’s margins, but waits until you click that content before running it, so you only use energy viewing the content you want to see.

Third-party data blocking
Safari blocks third-party websites from leaving data that could be used to track you online.

Faster Javascript
Thanks to the faster Nitro JavaScript engine in Safari, browsing is even faster and more responsive.

iCloud Tabs autocomplete (Mountain Lion only)
When you type into the Smart Search Field, Safari shows you webpages in your iCloud Tabs, making it even easier to pick up your browsing right where you left off on another device.

Yandex search built-in
Leading Russian search provider Yandex is a built-in option for Russian users, in addition to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Sandboxed plug-ins
Safari sandboxes popular plug-ins, making it safer to run them by restricting what they can do and what data they can access on your system. The Adobe Flash Player, Silverlight, QuickTime and Oracle Java plug-ins are sandboxed in Safari.

PDF sandboxing
Loading PDFs in Safari’s built-in PDF viewer is safer thanks to sandboxing. Sandboxing restricts what a file can do or access on your system, so if PDF file you view on the web contains malicious code, Safari can prevent it from harming your computer.

WEBKIT
Better text and layout

CSS Regions and Exclusions
Safari supports complex, magazine-like layouts for webpages. CSS Regions allow content in complex layouts to flow within different regions and still be associated. With CSS Exclusions, inline text and other content can flow around regions on a webpage.

Sticky positioning
With sticky positioning, elements can remain fixed within the Safari window even as the user scrolls.

Widow and orphan support
With widow and orphan support, you can specify page breaks and avoid awkward pagination in webpage text.

Kerning and Ligatures
Text in webpages automatically benefits from support for kerning and ligatures in Safari.

Sideways text orientation
With Safari support for text-orientation: sideways, Safari supports vertical text layouts that have horizontal text within them, helpful for webpages in East Asian languages.

CSS quotation marks
CSS quotation marks are now language sensitive, allowing your webpages to display the right quotation marks for your language character set.

Accessibility improvements
Captions for video
WebKit now supports out-of-band captioning on Mountain Lion and Lion. In-band subtitles are now supported on Mountain Lion.

Web Speech API
Support for the Web Speech API, Safari can convert text to speech and vice versa, allowing developers to create accessible, voice-driven web apps.

Other new features
High DPI for image-set
Support for high-DPI with the image-set function makes it easier to specify when to use higher-resolution images for displays with high pixel density.

HTTP strict transport security
Your website can now specify that only https should be used to connect.

Page visibility events
Safari now supports the page visibility API.

WEB INSPECTOR
New look. 
Web Inspector has a new look with a streamlined toolbar.

Activity Viewer.
The new Activity Viewer in the center of the toolbar gives you information about your webpage resources, loading time, logs, errors, and warnings at a glance.

Dock to right.
You can now dock the Web Inspector in the right of Safari window, making it easy to view mobile-sized webpages.

New Styles sidebar.
The new Styles sidebar simplifies CSS editing. The sidebar highlights syntax, autocompletes, and makes it easy to toggle properties on and off.

New Layers sidebar. 
The new Layers sidebar makes it simple to see how composited DOM elements impact your webpage’s memory usage and performance. Clicking a layer reveals a popover with more details.

Pretty code. 
Web Inspector automatically pretty prints minified JavaScript and CSS, with support for debugging while pretty printed.

Source Maps. 
Support for source maps lets you read and debug your code even after it has been combined and minified.

DOM tree. 
You can now undo or redo changes to the DOM and view shadow DOM elements alongside regular elements.

Pseudo-states. 
Toggle pseudo-states for your elements to easily test and tweak your hover, active, and focus style rules.

Console log. 
Web Inspector has improved copy and selection behavior, live search, and live filtering.

Timeline filtering. 
You can filter timeline events to more quickly analyze timeline data. Web Inspector now shows exactly which lines of code triggered layout and style recalculation.

Debugging improvements. 
Conditional breakpoints give you more control over when to pause in the debugger. When paused, you can now hover variables to see their values in an interactive popover.

Developers can download the seed from here.

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