The Safari 4 beta has been posted on Apple for awhile and there are people talking about it on the interwebs. So my turn. But rather than wax poetically about browser wars, which seems to be what everyone else is doing, I’ll constrain the conversation to the Safari 4 beta, which you can download from here.
If you haven’t moved into tabbed browsing yet, then after you install the upgrade you’re likely not going to notice much of a change. When you open Safari it will look a little like it always looked, with some minor enhancements to the GUI – notably the little picture of a bug in the upper right hand corner. This won’t be there when it’s a full release, it’s there to simply do what Apple wants you to do if you find a bug, report it. If you want to remove the item, right-click on it (control-click if you aren’t into the whole 2+ button mouse thing) and click Remove Item. To get it back you can right-click on the toolbar later and readd.
Now press Command-T to get a new tab. Woo-hoo, it’s on the top. I actually really like this feature as it gives me an extra line or two with websites I’m reading. The next thing you’ll notice about your new tab is that shiny tiled view of your 12 most favoritest sites. This should be pulled from your history. You can use the Edit button here to tell it to keep certain sites or remove them, in which case Safari will go ahead and replace it with the next most commonly visited item in your History. While in Edit mode, you can also use the Small, Medium, Large buttons to set the view to show 6, 12 and 24 panels respectively.
But what about History. Well, click on the History menu bar and then click on Show All History. You will be greeted with the sexy cover flow look that is becoming common in Apple products. Now click up in your search bar and type a letter. You’ll notice quickly that Suggestions and Recent Searches pops up pretty quickly. The smart search is pretty smart (although with a little plug-in whatnot you already had that in 3).
There’s also the Web Inspector, the only part of the browser I’m still not sold on. It offers a nice interface for editing Java, HTML, CSS, etc. It can cache databases and do all kinds of other wacky things. Why am I not sold on it? To be honest, I just started playing with it. It’s not in your menu items by default. To see it, go to the Safari Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and then click on the Show Develop Menu in menu bar. Now that you can see the menu item, click on the Show Web Inspector item. Here, you can access and browse through Resources (that’s where you’ll find most of the stuff at first btw). Overall, this is similar to the editor used to build Dashboard widgets. There are better development tools out there (far better), but they’re not bundled into a browser and to be honest, they don’t look nearly as cool…
Finally, the big one: Speed. I don’t have any metrics for this, still trying to decide how I would go about that. But, Safari 4 is faster than any other browser I’ve used. That’s not to say it seems faster. Without the status bar to show me it’s loading a page it actually seems a bit slower at first. But when you fire up another computer right by yours and test it out it’s remarkably faster… Especially for JavaScript (likely due to that whole Nitro engine thing).
