While Apple didn’t talk about it during the keynote at WWDC earlier today, the company released Safari 5 late this afternoon. According to Apple, Safari 5 features Reader, a new way to read Web pages without distractions of images or other content. When you go to a Web page, you just need to click the Reader button and the uncluttered version of the Web page will come up for you.

Safari 5 also uses the Nitro JavaScript engine, giving the browser a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.

With HTML 5 being so important for Apple, it’s no surprise that they have added more features to Safari. HTML5 features include full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video, HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

Safari 5 also gives developers an opportunity to create extensions for the Web browser. Extensions can be built using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and Apple has included an Extension Builder to make the creation easier. Apple noted that for “enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.”

Safari 5 will be available for free download from the company’s Web site. Apple’s Web site hasn’t been updated with the new version yet.