Apple releases Safari 5.1.2, adding PDF support and fixing bugs

Apple has today released an update to its Safari browser for Mac and Windows, bringing it to version 5.1.2, reports Macworld. The update brings a couple of minimal changes.

The first is the addition of support for viewing PDF’s directly on web pages. This gives Safari users the ability to view PDF documents ensconced in web content on a page.

There are also bu fixes related to an issue some users were seeing where a page would flash white while browsing. Most welcome among the list, however, is the mentions of improvements to stability and memory handling.

Safari 5.1 has never been the best with memory management and I’ve fallen victim to many crashes and hangs since updating to the latest version. The 5.1.1 update, released just a month ago, managed to mostly fix the ‘tab refresh’ bug that was killing me, but some memory related issues persisted.

The list of improvements:

• Address issues that could cause hangs and excessive memory usage
• Improve stability when using Find, dragging tabs, and managing extensions
• Improve stability for netflix.com and other websites that use the Silverlight plug-in
• Improve stability when zooming on Google maps
• Address an issue that could prevent East Asian character input into webpages with Flash content
• Address an issue that could cause History items to appear incorrectly
• Address an issue that could cause cleared Reading List items to appear Improve printing from Safari
• Address an issue that could prevent the Google Safe Browsing Service from updating

The Safari 5.1.2 is available from Software Update or directly from Apple and is intended for installation on Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later, Mac OS X 10.6.8 and Windows machines.