After reports that Apple was readying a major update to its Safari browser, it finally made its debut on Tuesday morning. Version 3.1 promises greatly improved performance and compatibility plus support for video and audio tags in HTML5, CSS animations, and CSS Web fonts.

On the surface, I suspect your eyes will glaze over when it comes to the arcane labels identifying various Internet standards. What you’re most likely concerned with is how fast and accurately it renders pages. Here, Apple claims “Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers.”

Notice they don’t mention Firefox 3, which promises improved JavaScript rendering speeds, but even if they’re close, you’ll probably never notice a difference of any significance.

You can get the download direct from Apple’s site, or just check your Software Update preference panel on your Mac. In fact, it should even appear in the Windows version of Software Update if you have a prior version installed on that platform.

Since Safari consists of more than just a lone application and a handful of support files, you’ll also encounter a restart so that the WebKit, which provides rendering capability for a host of Mac applications, which also include Mail, will be installed as well. The Windows Vista installation, however, doesn’t require a restart, since WebKit isn’t made available system-wide apparently.

On first launch, you’ll see nothing different if you already have Safari 3 installed — and that applies to those of you using 10.4.11 or Leopard. Safari isn’t like Firefox in that regard, displaying a fancy introductory page instead of your chosen home page on the first run.

While I realize some reviewers will be busy running canned Web benchmarks or sitting down with their stopwatches, I don’t browse the Internet that way, and I’m sure most of you don’t either, but feel free to correct me. In any case, I have always been pleased with Safari’s near-instantaneous launch times, and all 3.1 does is make “instant” seem a bit shorter.

Rendering speeds seem a tad snappier as well, compared to the previous version. I did not find any obvious incompatibilities, but I’ll continue to look.

As to support for newer standards, that’s a mixed bag. You see, being able to use your favored font is fine if all or most of the other browsers on the planet also supported CSS Web fonts. However, they don’t, so you’re left with the same font choices you have now. However, embracing newer standards is a good thing, and I’m sure Mozilla can be depended upon to continue to update its compatibility quotient. As to Microsoft, only they know for sure. They claim that Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to standard with more fidelity than previous versions, but with Microsoft, you have to be skeptical of their claims until the finished product is available.

For most of you, Safari 3.1 will be your favorite browser, near world-class and you aren’t going to see any incentive to go elsewhere, unless you need to check your own sites for compatibility with different applications.

But Apple is still missing a few important features that ought to be considered for 3.2, 3.5, or whatever the next major release will be called. Chief among them is the ability to selectively control pop-up blocking. You see, there are some sites, such as Federal Express, that provide pop-up screens that you need to access when you’re preparing a shipment online. Sure, you can go to the Safari menu and disable blocking for that session, but since other browsers support the selective capability, I can’t see where Apple’s “keep it simple” approach is useful.

Another missing feature is phishing protection. Sure you can get that with third-party malware protection utilities, but this is a significant danger in the online world, one that doesn’t support a specific computing platform or user demographic. It’s quite easy to make a mistake and click on a link in an email that takes you to a fake site, instead of your bank or other online financial resource. Firefox has it. Internet Explorer has it, and it’s time for Apple, which is pushing the Windows version of Safari, to get with the program.

Of course, if you feel you need phishing protection and want to continue to use Safari and not invest in third-party software, you can do what I do, which is to use OpenDNS to handle your site access. It’s seamless, super-quick, and provides industry-standard phishing protection.

Other than my few quibbles, I hope to continue to spend most of my time in Safari, and I highly recommend the 3.1 update.

One thing is perfectly clear and that’s the fact that most Mac users who have upgraded to Leopard are quite satisfied with that decision. Surveys show over 80%, which is extremely good, particularly when you compare the levels recorded with Windows.

What do I mean?

Well, Windows XP gets a pretty decent rate too, but Vista is down in the dumps, with only a little more than a quarter of the upgraders reporting decent levels of satisfaction.

Now consider that Leopard has been out just short of five months, whereas it’s been nearly 14 months since Vista shipped to consumers. During that time, Microsoft has had plenty of time to fix the worst ills. True, there have been lots of obtuse updates, and, of course, the infamous Service Pack One that’s now becoming available for download. But the early reviews of SP1 don’t seem promising. Sure, there are loads of under-the-hood changes, and perhaps application and driver compatibility is improved, but the core problems with the bloated Vista operating system are still there. It’s still slow and it still requires an extremely powerful PC to provide the full user experience, complete with Aero eye-candy.

Consider that Microsoft squandered billions of dollars developing Vista, but they couldn’t get it out on time, nor with all the promised features intact. In fact, during the final stages of Vista’s development, it has been revealed that MIcrosoft had to kowtow to Intel to build a “Home Basic” edition that would allow entry-level PCs, using older chipsets, to be declared as capable of running the system.

Now I don’t pretend to know all the internal decisions and compromises Microsoft had to make in order to finish up Vista. Certainly they were under an awful lot of pressure, and it’s no longer true that they can just do what they want and the rest of the personal computing world will follow in lockstep. Antitrust actions have surely changed that situation for good.

However, Microsoft must have known the product roadmaps for both AMD and Intel early on, and realized the level of computing power needed to get Vista to run in a satisfactory fashion was far too high. They had to also realize that Mac OS X can run on a wide variety of Apple hardware, dating back as much as four to six years, with all or most features intact. It’s not as if Microsoft doesn’t know what Apple is doing, since their Mac Business Unit is one of the largest — if not the largest — third-party Mac developer. They’re getting Apple’s prelease seeds as quickly as Adobe, Quark and all the rest, maybe even sooner.

Armed with that knowledge, is it plain incompetence that dictated Vista’s direction, or a level of hubris that is totally beyond logic? Maybe Microsoft was filled with the images of people lining up to buy Windows 95 upgrades and forgot to look at the calendar, forgetting that was long ago and far away.

Yes, there will be another Windows, known as Windows 7, which will appear some time in 2009, 2010 or maybe later. Perhaps Microsoft is working really hard behind the scenes to recover from the Vista disaster, and perhaps the next version of Windows will focus more on cleaning up the excesses. Or maybe MIcrosoft figures that, by then, most PC hardware will comfortably cope with massive system requirements without buckling under the pressure.

This is not to say that Leopard is necessarily the perfect operating system. Aside from some of the excesses perpetrated by some of the Mac troubleshooting sites these days, there are still genuine problems that need to be fixed. For example, AirPort connections can, at times, still be flaky, although it’s not at all certain whether the fix requires a Leopard update or an AirPort fix.

Other issues include persistent flakiness with cross-platform networking, something that was also prevalent in Tiger and not fixed until the very end of the latter’s lifecycle.

Some of you claim that Leopard crashes more often than Tiger, or at least the applications you run, but that might just be the fault of the third parties who still need to bring their products up to date. Unfortunately, when things like that happen, it’s awfully easy for the affected software company to just blame Apple, claim that some change or incomplete feature in Leopard has caused them grief, and it’ll take time to sort things out.

I don’t pretend to know all the answers, so I won’t blame anyone. I just want things to work, and when it comes to that, I rarely encounter any crashes in Leopard. It seems, to me at least, to be about as stable as Tiger, if not more so. Performance is noticeably snappier, no doubt the result of hard work to improve the Finder’s performance, which remains the linchpin of the Mac user experience.

As always, our Comments section is open for your repsonses. This time, I also want to hear from Windows users. As much as some of you hate Microsoft products, millions of businesses depend on Windows for their core operations. We all benefit if everything works fine, and suffer when things fail.

If you asked me several years ago which Mac software I found indispensable, I probably would have placed QuarkXPress at or near the top of the list. Although I have made my living for years as a writer, I also worked for a time in the traditional typesetting industry, and later migrated to desktop publishing. Or let me put it more bluntly: I migrated because it was necessary in order to earn a living.

Well, a lot has changed since then. Yes, the writing continues, but, after more than five years of online broadcasting, I’ve modified my list of essential software in various obvious ways. As always when I do lists of this sort, consider the results arbitrary and not meant to reflect some sort of special recommendations on my part. I’m just telling you what works for me.

• WireTap Studio: I first became acquainted with Andrew Welch, of Ambrosia Software, nearly two decades ago when he was a shareware developer working his way through college. Today he’s turned the shareware into a full-time enterprise, and I consider WireTap Studio his featured product, aside from his Mac-only games of course. At its core, it simply captures audio from a variety of sources, including Internet radio and iChat and Skype chats. However, it also includes a reasonably full-featured audio editing component that many of you find perfectly suited to handling all your work, whether it’s a podcast, or extracting the commercials from the shows you’ve downloaded. Yes, it does supprt Apple’s Audio Units and comes with a few extras you’ll want to try out.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

All right, settle down readers, because our Special Correspondent, David Biedny, has come up with the perfect solution to help Microsoft get out from under its wasteful financial practices.

Now imagine a scenario where Microsoft President Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang are seated across the table from each other, trying to hash out their differences. When Yang balks at Microsoft’s latest offer, Ballmer stomps on over to him, slaps him in the head, and says: “Hey, bud, we’re paying you a bundle of cash for — a Web site. It’s just a Web site. It’s just a bunch of servers, that’s all. What kind of money did you expect?”

Of course, to be serious for a second (don’t worry it won’t last), Yahoo is more than just a Web site. There is a whole lot of intellectual property involved, and endless hours to program the code that creates this hugely popular online portal. But at the end of the day, Yahoo doesn’t actually build anything that you can buy in a store. You just go to their site and do your thing, or subscribe, say, to their Web hosting service and have their site run your site.

For all that, they expect billions and billions of dollars. But if Microsoft somehow believes that they’re worth it, I suppose they are. However, being willing to shell out $46 billion or some such figure for something they’ve tried to develop on their own for years without success surely shows that Microsoft has some serious problems. After all, how much money should it cost for them to hire the best developers on the planet — maybe dangle large checks and steal some key players from Google and Yahoo — and build the damn thing by themselves?

Of course, that’s the problem. Microsoft has done fine with its core products, such as Windows and Office, but most everything they do that strays from the source of their success doesn’t do so well. In fact, after pouring billions and billions of dollars into various and sundry ventures, what have they to show for it?

Well, consider the attempt to compete with the iPod. Now I don’t pretend to know how much Apple has spent on the product — and the iPhone for that matter — since Day One. But I’m willing to bet their entire R&D budget was less than a billion dollars, total, for all these gadgets.

Microsoft has thrown away tons of cash, first on a Windows-only substitute for iTunes, and then on their own music player, the doomed Zune. I am willing to suggest the total investment was more than Apple spent, but Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand how to do anything but build a mediocre imitation of a two-year-old iPod.

On the other hand, it’s fair to say that Microsoft squandered billions and billions of dollars to build Windows Vista, and look what that brought them? So maybe they’ve lost track of their core competency too. All they did was leverage something from existing products. In contrast, Apple took the original NeXT operating system, and has built six major releases of Mac OS X since 2001. By any gauge, it’s been a huge success, but their combined investment was a fraction of what Microsoft paid for failure.

So it’s fair to say that Microsoft’s mindset is such that they believe that if you throw enough money at something, you’ll buy success. But how many failures does it take before they realize they need a new strategy, and when, in fact, will the stockholders start demanding action?

Now David has another idea, and you shouldn’t take it seriously. But certainly it stands a greater chance of success than anything Microsoft has tried thus far. During “The David Biedny Zone” segment on the latest episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, he suggested that Microsoft send us a check, consisting of half a billion dollars for David and half a billion dollars for, of course, me.

Give us two years, and we’ll build the successful Web portal that Microsoft cannot buy. In fact, we’re willing to spend a total of $80 million, half from each of our shares, to hire some great talent to help us create the ultimate Yahoo killer.

Even better, if we don’t succeed, Microsoft can just write off that investment. Sound wasteful? Not when you consider how much they’re willing to dump for Yahoo, or the billions they’ve wasted on other projects that had, at best, middling success.

So what say you Steve Ballmer? Want to bet on another sure thing?