Safari 4.0 Beta is Out and Awesome

[Vincent Ferrari]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.apple.com/safari/' target='_blank'>http://www.apple.com/safari/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"It's a browser. It's a platform. It's an open invitation to innovate. Whether on a Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod touch, Safari continuously redefines the browser, providing the most enjoyable way to experience the Internet."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//at/auto/1235492721.usr18053.png" /></p><p>It's hard to describe something as visceral as a web browser to someone, but Safari 4.0 is a great browser. In many ways it reminds me of chrome. Take a look at the screenshot above. If that doesn't remind you of Chrome's home screen, nothing will. Immediately noticeable is the overall speed and snappiness of Safari. For a beta it's pretty stable (except for us Thoughts Media writers; it doesn't really like our publishing system) and I haven't come across any major hiccups so far. If you want to go over the "150 new features" Apple added, you can check them out <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

[doogald]

I'm using it right now in the Win7 beta (so that's a beta squared, I guess), and it is darned snappy. It froze on me once so far, otherwise, it's very nice.

I do wish that Foxmarks sync worked with Safari on the Windows side, but I was able to import IE favorites, so it's all ok.

[crimsonsky]

My son also mentioned the similarity to Chrome. What I've found so far is that it's wickedly fast! Wonderful. The new tab arrangement will take some getting used to, but overall looking good.

[Vincent Ferrari]

I'm using it right now in the Win7 beta (so that's a beta squared, I guess), and it is darned snappy. It froze on me once so far, otherwise, it's very nice.

Mine did something relatively silly. It randomly turned off image loading on page load. I banged my head against the desk for an hour trying to work that one out. Aside from that, and the afforementioned Thoughts Media issues, it really is pretty good. Facebook looks weird, but that might just be a standards-related issue.

Overall, Safari 4 is great and it's now my default browser on Mac and Windows machines.

[doogald]

I actually just installed on Leopard and actually found that it ran fine, but Mail was crashing when it retrieved mail. It turned out that I had to remove GrowlMail (not just disable it - I had to delete it from the ~/Library/Mail/Bundles folder) and everything was fine.

It seems to take much longer to launch (Safari 4, that is) but it definitely renders pages faster.

[Vincent Ferrari]

It seems to take much longer to launch (Safari 4, that is) but it definitely renders pages faster.

It definitely takes a few seconds to start up, but the page rendering speeds are blazing.