Late last night, Apple seeded a new build of Safari to developers, 5.1.2 beta, which brings a fix to the embedded PDF viewing and printing issues that were present in previous versions of the browser. It also introduces a “known bug” that causes extensions to crash. As the ancient Romans used to say, caveat developor.
In the release notes, Apple asks testers to focus their efforts on making sure printing’s working okay, by either attempting to print embedded PDFs or just normal web pages.
In addition, a bug that prevented in-line PDFs from being viewable has been fixed.
The “known bug” Apple warns about in Safari 5.1.2 involves the “beforeload” event some extensions use, which can render Safari unstable, but Apple doesn’t seem too concerned, and doesn’t suggest developers try to stay clear of the event.
If you’re in Apple’s developer program, you can download Safari 5.1.2 now through their official portal. It’s available for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and higher, as well as Windows XP SP3. When 5.1.2 is released to the public, we’ll let you know.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
