New Safari 4 Beta Internet Browser

A Week ago, on February 24, Apple released its new Safari 4 beta internet browser.  According to the Apple, it is supposed to be “[t]he world’s fastest browser”. Well, this can be argued at least until the final version is released. However, a couple of interesting things can be explored already in Safari 4 beta.

Apple claims that there are 150 features. I counted more than 30 of them as new features in the Safari 4 beta in several categories such as Advanced Web technologies, Accessibility, Bookmarks, Browsing and Navigation, User Interface and others. You can find a list of categories with descriptions here. So let’s look closer at few of them.

Under the category Advanced Web Technologies, we can find a description of the new Nitro JavaScript Engine feature. According to Apple, it supposed to execute JavaScript four times faster than latest version of Firefox 3.1 and six times faster than Internet Explorer 8 RC1. During my testing, Safari 4 beta was really loading websites faster than Firefox 3.1 but not as fast as Google Chrome beta.

Another nice looking feature is Top Sites that is related to the convenient browsing in the Browsing and Navigation section. This is probably the most significant change that everyone will notice. The Top Sites feature, according to Apple, “automatically identifies your favorite sites and displays them as a wall of stunning graphical previews.“ This makes it easier to get to your favorite news site or email account in one click. In addition, browsing tabs has been moved to the title bar. This aesthetic change took me a while to get used to. However, I agree with Apple that laptop users might appreciate this change since it will save a little bit of space on their screens in order to have more room for web content.

Some changes can also be found in the Bookmark section. One of them is Cover Flow that is used for bookmark and history browsing. You can flip your websites in same way like your album Arts in iTunes. Very impressive.

The last feature that I appreciate is in the Accessibility Section. It is Full-page Zoom. This feature is probably the most important for me since I have a laptop with very high native screen resolution and many websites are very small on my screen. Thus, full page zoom allows me to magnify pages as I need it based on how far I am from my laptop screen. It is not only a font zoom that actually doesn’t work well on many websites, but it zooms the whole website including font and graphics so the web page stays consistent. Safari 4 is still beta version, so I already experienced some bugs with this zooming feature in my Yahoo mail account. After zooming, I wasn’t able to click on several buttons.  Nevertheless, I believe that this will be fixed in the final version since this feature works in Firefox without any problems.

In summary, Safari 4 Beta introduces new ideas and features for convenient browsing and navigation that makes it more user friendly. In addition, there is lot of under the hood in coding that makes the browser faster and more effective.

To find further reviews and information, you can go to the Apple official site for Safari 4 Beta or read further reviews at MacWorld.com: First Look: Safari 4 Beta.