Safari 4 Beta
I’ve been playing with the new Safari 4 beta for the past hour and there are some pretty notable changes. All in all I think it’s a pretty great update, I might finally be able to ditch that sluggish behemoth known as “Firefox” once and for all.
I’ll leave a real breakdown of the features to someone who is good at writing those things, but the short list is:
- The Windows version is now sporting a native Windows UI. The Apple UI has never looked quite right in Windows, I think this is a great change and a big step towards getting people to actually use Safari in Windows.
- Tabs in the title bar, similar to Google Chrome and Stainless. I’m not 100% sure why, but I expect it was well researched given the technical hassle it must have presented.
- Speaking of tabs, in old Safari once you started dragging a tab left or right you could no longer drag it out of the window, this is fixed in the beta. Kind of a nitpick but it’s been bugging me for a while.
- Bookmarks and History views now use coverflow. I think this is a hugely useful addition, I’ve been using SafariStand largely because of the coverflow history view it offers and I’ve found it very helpful.
- A “top sites” start page similar to what Google Chrome and Opera offer.
- Everything from Webkit. This primarily (to me) means the new, speedy javascript engine and a much improved web inspector.
