Safari Now Chokes Less on SVG

I upgraded mainly because I wanted to see if the new Safari handled SVG any better than Safari 4. It does! Check out, for example, Sam Ruby’s site. He uses SVG ornaments inserted as inline SVG in his xhtml flavored html5 page. In the old Safari, these ornaments would get parts chopped off if you zoomed the page. In Safari 5, there is no problem. This was more than a cosmetic issue; if you wanted to use an SVG to put an equation, for example, inline with your text, Safari 4 would mess up the spacing. Firefox and Google Chrome (which uses the webkit rendering engine, as does Safari) both have handled inline SVG properly for some time.

Safari 5 still has a slight problem displaying SVG inside an object tag, with scrollbars appearing and disappearing as you zoom in and out of a page. But it handles this much better than the previous version, which went sort of haywire.

One annoying thing about upgrading Safari: you are required to restart the machine. To upgrade a browser! So I had to reboot the Mac for the first time in 147 days.