UPDATE: Safari 5 is now available here: Apple - Safari 5.

A press release announcing the release of Safari 5 hit the wires and was pulled shortly thereafter — indicating that although we didn’t hear anything about it in today’s WWDC keynote, the next version of Apple’s WebKit-based browser should be available in the extremely near future.

We don’t see Safari 5 available via System Update yet which, combined with the pulled press release, may indicate some problem serious enough to cause delay was encountered at the last minute. Nevertheless we should expect the new browser version to hit the streets (and by “the streets” we mean “the tubes“) very soon, so let’s take a look at the new goodies we should be expecting to see in this release:

• Safari Reader — a new scrollable interface for reading RSS feeds “without distraction.” We’re imagining some kind of stripped down and uncluttered newsreader interface.
• Safari Extensions — this ups the ante from Safari Add-Ons that arguably weren’t widely known or used and should make extending the browser capability more equivalent to the robust extensions experience enjoyed by Firefox and Chrome users.
• Extension Builder — a new tool for developers to help make it easy to develop and deploy extensions. Along with this, Apple reports a “new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.”
• The option to use Bing as the default search engine, just like it was announced for Safari Mobile today
• 30% performance boost over Safari 4
• Improved developer tools
• Over a dozen new HTML5 technologies

The press release had indicated that Safari 5 would be available today, but since that document was now been pulled it’s hard to say when this might finally drop (we’ve embedded the text below). It will likely be pretty soon however, so if you notice the browser turn up before we do please shoot us a tip.

What are you most looking forward to in Safari 5?

They are touting Bing everywhere they can. "Eff you Google!"