It also saves credit card numbers and Wi-Fi loginsjust dont expect it to keep out the NSA.

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Lion was 29.99, and Mountain Lion went for a very reasonable 19.99, but at its fall event in San Francisco, Apple dropped a bombshell by announcing that its new desktop operating system, OS X 10.9 Mavericks would be a free download.

Internet Explorer 10.9 For Free To A

While its true that Mavericks is not the OS paradigm shift represented by Microsofts Windows 8 (itself recently updated for free to a much improved Windows 8.1 ), Mavericks does bring quite a few new capabilities to the Mac.

Internet Explorer 10.9 Mac OS X Features

And a pair of longstanding Mac OS X features have been considerably improvedCalendar and Safari.

Safari not only gets a redesign, but also a speed boost, a new Shared Links feature, and more standards support.

A new organizational tool, Tags, works the way tagging in photo apps has worked for years: attach a text keyword to any file, and youll be able to find it quickly in a Finder sidebar.

To put Apples new OS through its paces, I installed Mavericks on a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and a 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU.

That said, iBooks for Mac is a well-done piece of software, just as youd expect from Apple.

Like the latest iTunes desktop app, a button switches you between your library and the store, which boasts over 2 million books (compared with Amazon Kindles claimed 2.7 million and Barnes Noble Nooks 3 million).

Look up words, make use of highlighting and notes, and rest assured that everything is synced among all your Macs and iOS devices.

Mac OS X Mavericks now follows suit, allowing multiple monitors to show the Dock and menu bars.

It requires no configurationfor real: I plugged in a Dell monitor and immediately saw the Mavericks wave wallpaper.

It also works with Apple TV-connected HDTVs as well as HDMI and Thunderbolt monitors.

One Windows multi-monitor feature I missed, though was the ability to drag each screens position around: My mouse cursor entered the screen from the wrong direction.

Another limitation I ran into was that I couldnt span a window across displays.

But having a dedicated OS X Maps app adds some definite benefits, especially if you use devcies in the Apple ecosystemiPads and iPhones as well as Macs.

The Mac Maps app lets you route trip directions and send them to your iPhone for turn-by-turn audio directions once you leave.

It also sports a dazzling Flyover view for a 3D look at the world.

The apps design takes a lead from iOS 7, but maintains color coding, multiple calendar support, and subscriptions.

But Safari is a browser to be reckoned with, with plenty of its own innovations.

The version that comes with Mavericks brings HTML5 compliance among the leaders, with a score of 385 on HTML5Test.com.

It also features an updated Top Sites page, to keep the design more in line with iOS 7.

Speed wise, in preliminary benchmarking I saw an improvement on a 2.3GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro from 10757 to 15567a pretty significant boost.

PCMag has been exhorting readers to use strong password-management tools like LastPass for years, and the recent spate of high-profile breaches makes this even more essential.

Internet Explorer For Mac Os X 10.9