The new safari 4 (beta) browser features
Yesterday I installed the safari 4.0 beta. The latest safari version works on windows, as well as mac. There are about a 150 features according to Apple. Some are new, some old.
First obvious changes are the top sites and the new tabs. The UI now has a more windows-like feel to it (in a good way :). It has the look and feel of the chrome browser. Opera and other browsers already had something similar to top sites. Top sites is like a 3D gallery of your most visited websites. It monitors changes in websites since your last visit and marks changes by adding a blue star icon in the right hand corner. That way keeping yourself up-to-date was never easier. Too bad it‘s not as responsive as I‘d want it to be, so I won‘t use it as my start page yet.
The new tabs take a bit of getting used to but gains you about 20px of space because the tabs are on top now. The full-page zoom is a cool feature which allows you to zoom in on a page without any loss of quality of the fonts. Images are being upscaled whilst zooming. Another added feature is the cover flow to browse through your favourites. In my opinion this looks fancy but is quite useless.
Safari 4 is amazingly fast. Even faster that the previous version. The reason it‘s that fast is it pre-loads the content from your most viewed websites and Safari now also uses the Nitro javascript engine which executes javascripts even up to 42 times faster then IE7, 3.5 times faster then Firefox 3.0 and 1.2 times faster than google Chrome (So stop using Internet explorer and download yourself a real browser like Firefox or Safari). Nowadays most websites use javascript to add a bit of dynamic to websites, so this makes a big difference in load-time. There‘s a full review on the speed of safari compared to other major browsers on ZDnet.
For web developers they‘ve included the developer tools, like the webinspector, javascript debugger and error console. This makes up a bit for the lack of a firebug-like tool in Safari. CSS 3 is included so now it‘s possible for web developers and designers to use other fonts then the limited set of websafe fonts. Overall Safari has definitely improved since version 3.0, but there are some things that they shouldn‘t have changed. The first thing to annoy me was the inconspicuous refreshing of a webpage. It just show a small loading icon on the right side of the address bar. I just kept hitting the command-R. Simon showed me a website with the terminal commands to change back to the 3.0 look but keep the 4.0 core. Leave out the last command to keep the tabs on top.
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO
On the swedischcampground.com website there are some other hidden Safari 4 preferences to tweak safari to your needs.
UPDATE: I‘ve been working with safari 4 now for 3 weeks or so and I still find the previous layout better. There are still some bugs in it. e.g. the modals in tiny_mce don‘t work. When a modal window opens everything gets disabled. So you have to refresh your page to continue. Furthermore I‘m not using the top sites because it‘s too slow, although I like the concept of it.
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