I don't demand a heck of a lot from my browser anymore. I've weened myself from dependence on add-ons and plugins and moved to as many bookmarklets as possible so that I don't miss a beat when switching among the myriad of browsers installed on my system.

While I've been using Firefox for ages, I've been playing with Chromium for quite some time and become used to its speed. I downloaded Safari 4 when the final became available yesterday and was impressed.

Speed isn't the be-all and end-all for a browser, but it's pretty dang important. And yes, Firefox has gotten faster of late, but it's still not quite on par with the Webkit Wonder Twins (no, I couldn't have picked two superheros who sucked more while still having super powers - sorry Zan and Jayna).

Apart from its obvious speed improvements, how about Safari's ability to kill an unresponsive plugin (like Flash) on a page without the whole browser falling to pieces? I'll have that, please.

One other small detail that I was pleased to find was better support for the Windows 7 taskbar. Just like IE8, you'll get a hover thumbnail for every tab and window Safari currently has open. Download progress is indicated on the icons as well. It's not perfect - hovering a particular thumbnail only shows a blank page on all but your active tab, but it's better than all the other non-IE browsers have achieved so far.

Wait a minute. Did that seriously just happen while I was putting this post together?

Apple is taking the beta label off of Safari 4 today amid a flurry of news at WWDC. A public beta of the web browser has been available for Mac and Windows since February, and in fact when you go to the Safari download page, you're still greeted with a beta version of the browser. We're guessing the full version will be available later this afternoon. Update: It's available now.

Apple claims Safari 4 runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari 3, 4 times faster than Firefox 3, and 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8. The company says the browser loads HTML web pages 3 times faster than Firefox 3, although the company admits that performance can vary from system to system. I'm going to venture a guess that it may differ from web page to web page as well.

When OS X Snow Leopard is released later this year, Apple says Safari will be able to run as a 64-bit application, boosting performance by up to 50%.

Safari 4 features a Google Chrome/Opera style new tab page which provides you with thumbnail shortcuts to pages you visit frequently. The browser also features full page zoom, and a smarter URL bar with auto-complete functionality.

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.

Update: It's worth pointing out that Safari 4 is also the first non-beta browser release to get a perfect score on the Acid3 test.

Update: Nope, sorry, nope...Chromium still beats Safari on V8 (rather soundly, at that)...Dromaeo results in in a few minutes! --Lee

Update: Ok, on Dromaeo the results were much closer. My Chromium Nightly Build won 26 categories while Safari claimed 23. I tried several Chrome Experiments, and they generally run much more smoothly on Chromium. --Lee

[via Engadget]

Apple has launched a public beta of Safari 4, the latest update to its web browser for OS X and Windows. The new browser is fast, attractive, and to be honest, feels a lot like Google Chrome. Both browsers use the WebKit rendering engine, so for the most part if you can view a page in one browser it should render properly in the other (although the Safari 4 download page didn't work properly in Google Chrome - I had to fire up Firefox in order for the download link to appear Update: It looks like the download page now works in Chrome). And now Safari also automatically generates thumbnail previews of the pages you visit more frequently, just as Google Chrome does.

Sure, both Google and Apple ripped the feature off from Opera, which had a Speed Dial feature long before anybody. But Safari 4's new Top Sites feature is pretty slick. When you first launch the browser you're greeted with thumbnails for popular web sites like Wikipedia and Google Maps. As you use the browser, Safari will detect which web sites you visit mos frequently and add them to the list.

There's also a little history search box in the bottom right corner of the screen. Start typing a query and Safari will conduct a full history search. But unlike Chrome or Firefox which show the results in the locationbar, Safari will bring up a Cover Flow window and show you previews of each web site containing your search term.

Like Google Chrome, Safari 4 moves the browser tabs to the very top of the window and has a smarter address field that saves you time when typing a web address. For instance, once I've typed www.downloadsquad.com once, the next time I start to type "down" Safari will fill out the rest of me.

Safari has also added the full page zoom feature that's so popular with the kids these days, and which is missing from Google Chrome, which only lets you zoom in on text. The Windows version of Safari 4 also supports native Windows fonts, title bars, and borders.

As with most Apple products, if you're installing the Windows version you'll want to be careful during the installation process. If you don't uncheck all of the options, you could wind up installing several other utilities in addition to the web browser.