Apple releases Safari 4 public beta
It looks like the browser wars just kicked it up one more notch. Apple has released the first public beta version of Safari 4, a browser with some serious improvements.
The most apparent of these improvement is speed. Just subjectively, Safari 4 seems faster than the competition. At the heart of Safari 4 lies the Nitro engine, a core that has obviously been significantly improved. Apple says that its new browser runs JavaScript four times as fast as the previous version of Safari, three times faster than Firefox 3, and a full 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, according to a MacWorld article. In a further comparison with IE7, Apple says that Safari 4 will load HTML pages three times faster than it’s Microsoft competition.
Corporate personnel are concentrating on the improvements in browsing speed offered by the new product. Brian Croll, senior director system software, Apple Worldwide Product Marketing, said, “Safari has always been all about performance, innovative features and web standards. Safari 4 takes the next big step in driving innovation in browsers.”
Safari 4 offers more than just improved speed. Safari 4 offers users a number of completely new features for an Apple browser, including:
- Top Sites, which which offers users a visual preview of the sites that they have visited the most often.
- Cover Flow, which makes it easier to search through history and bookmarks.
- Tabs on Top, which makes tabbed browsing a little easier for the user.
- Full History Search, which lets users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages.
- Smart Search, which gives you suggestions from Google and other previous Safari searches.
- Smart Address, which automatically shows a drop-down list when you begin typing a URL into the address field showing the top hit, plus history and bookmark suggestions.
Smart search and Smart Address are especially nice. If you want to go back to a Web site you visited recently, but can’t remember the name or address, Safari 4 makes it much easier to find that one specific page that you want to see. Using Safari 4, you can look through your history based on the URL, page title or even a bit of the text contained in the page itself. This is a truly helpful feature.
The public beta version of Safari 4 is available now, free of charge, as a download from Apple’s Web site. This is more than an incremental update. The increased speed alone is worth the price of admission. You owe it to yourself to give this new version of the Safari browser a test drive.
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