While undocumented in the release notes, last week’s Mac OS X 10.3.9 update includes a new version of Safari that brings substantially improved page load times. Safari 1.3 loads pages 35 percent faster than version 1.2, according to Safari developer Dave Hyatt. In addition to the performance increase, the new version of Safari has a very similar layout engine to that of the version that will ship with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. “This update includes Safari 1.3 and new versions of WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore that contain thousands of improvements we’ve made to the engine since Safari 1.2,” Hyatt writes on his blog. “What you are getting is all of the new standards support, new WebKit capabilities, site compatibility fixes and performance optimizations that are also present in Safari 2.0 for Tiger.”