Apple Safari 4 Public Beta: Quick Glance
Apple recently launched its public beta of Safari 4, promising performance and compatibility improvements over previous version. After a few minutes of playing around with the browser, here’s my verdict: Pretty Good.
Where are the Tabs?
When you first start the browser, it looks slightly different. First of all, the tab bar is gone, and Apple have moved the tab bar all the way up on the title bar (ala Google Chrome):
Enhanced Display and Presentation
Apple have also enhanced the way the “Top Sites” display, and improved the functionality. Now the top sites by default will cater to your frequently visited sites (I can’t help but feel that this is similar to Chrome), but you can also edit the entries to show which site that you want to be there (something like Opera’s):
Edit Mode:
Not only this, but Apple have made the bookmarks and history pages to something similar to iTunes or Mac OSX finder. I believe this display is known as ‘Coverflow’:
If you’re a user of Firefox 3, you know that Firefox have integrated the address bar to also become an “awesome bar” where your bookmarks and history will be found in there as well. Looks like Safari 4 already adopted similar system, what they called “Smart Address Field”:
Performance
Apple have switched their JavaScript engine to “Nitro”, which claims that the JavaScript performance will be 4.2 times faster than in Safari 3. Previously I did not use Safari 3 much because it has this strange bug where when you open more than one AJAX-heavy page (normally for my case, its Facebook and GMail), one of them tend to be broken until you close the other tab. I’ve yet to experience this with Safari 4, but let’s give it a couple of days of full usage to show its true colors.
On overall impression scale of my short use of this browser, it does feel significantly faster than my Firefox and Chrome.
On the other hand, Safari 4 claims to be 100% compliant with the web standards, now supporting CSS3 and HTML5 fully, and has passed Acid3 test with 100% score.
Like I said, let’s give it some time then we’ll see how this browser is doing. I’m still a little unhappy with its huge footprint on my RAM (I have 5 tabs open in Firefox and it uses around 120MB of RAM, but I only have 3 tabs open in Safari 4, but its already consuming 170MB of RAM).
For those who wants to see the full features of Safari 4, you can read it at the product page.
Hey there, morning Ross.
I just found out that in Safari 4, you can’t drag tabs about like you can in a modded Firefox or in Chrome. However, you can still right click and then “move tab to a new window”. But in all honesty, I can’t really help but to feel that I’m using another “rebranded Google Chrome” with Safari 4. Just can’t kick off that feeling.
In a test drive with an EDGE connection, I don’t really see the supposedly ‘marked up’ performance (where it’s supposed to be faster than any other web browsers)
Maybe you’ll want to look into this?
(And I just found out that despite the looks, it isn’t “pre-C2D” machines friendly. On a P4 system and its ilk, installation was a pain (because it does take long) and the memory footprint (is that how you call it for memory usage?) is whopping huge for 2-3 tabs on an older system.
Note that the “fast” part is the performance of the website (especially those heavy scripted one), not really the load time. That still depends on your connection ability.
I do agree on the memory footprint though. it’s a bit on the high end. Probably due to the very graphical features like CoverFlow and the Top Sites.