Mihai Parparita a Google Reader Engineer posted a thread in Google Groups stating that they have released a new update for Google Reader. The most noticeable change with this update are the new buttons in Google Reader, it looks like this:

But it does seem a bit snappier on my Mac, which was the main reason I did not use it.

The update includes, as per Mihai's post:

• There is a new button style and some links have been replaced with buttons to make them more discoverable
• blip.tv is now supported as an embedded video source
• Tags are consistently referred to as "tags" (as opposed to "labels")
• The shared items page now has a clear link to its feed (it's always had auto-discovery, but that's not always discoverable)
• Oops errors after a Firefox crash and session restore should be fixed
• Some small performance improvements
• Improved behavior in nightly builds of WebKit

I asked if these do address the Apple Safari issues and if they do, I will give it another run. I suspect they do, since Mihai commented at my last post saying "things should get better with the next release of Safari" and this is the next release.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.