by , 8:20 AM EDT, March 18th, 2008

Apple announced the immediate availability of Safari 3.1 on Tuesday. The updated version of Apple's cross platform Web browser is the first to add support for HTML 5 video and audio tags, and CSS animations.

Safari 3.1 also supports CSS Web fonts, and Apple claims it loads Web pages 1.9 times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.

The browser requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher, or Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Safari 3.1 is free and available via Apple's Software Update application, or as a download at the Apple Web site.