Apple has released Safari 3.1 to developers for private testing this week, within the minor update Apple will bundle many of the enhancements that are included in Webkit, an open source applications framework.

One significant addition to Safari 3.1 will be support of HTML5’s SQL storage API, which is a client-side database storage programming interface that will allow a future array of web applications to store structured data locally on a user’s machine using SQL.

Also included is CSS Transforms, CSS Animations and web downloable fonts, all of these allow users to render web pages with enhanced design and interaction.

For example by applying Transforms developers can rotate, scale, and skew HTML boxes in real time.

Finally, Apple has included a native version of the getElementsByClassName JavaScript function.

The function is often added to web pages via JavaScript libraries, serving only to bog down page load times.

According to Apple, the native version of the function provides many advantages, chief among them “blindingly fast” speed. For testing purposes, company engineers wrote a simple benchmark to pit the native version of their function against those using both XPath and a straight JavaScript/DOM implementation. The native function executed 10,000 iterations of the getElementsByClassName benchmark in 155ms, compared to 4,728ms and 13,053ms for the XPath and JavaScript/DOM versions, respectively.