Apple Releases Safari 4 Beta

Saw the news this morning that Apple has released Safari 4 beta for the masses. It's free of course, for mac and PC, and has a few interesting new changes:

• Faster Javascript interpreter (everyone's doing it, Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1 and (I think) IE8 all have amped up JS engines)
  
• Tabs on top (meh, copying Google Chrome one could argue... I don't see the big deal personally)
  
• Sexy history browsing (coverflow full page previews, sexy as only Apple can do)
  
• Sexy "Top Sites" (again, very similar to the Google Chrome home page or Opera speed dial feature, but sexy again, as Apple does best)
  
• Native look on windows (probably a good thing)
  
• Developer tools (if they are of the caliber of Firebug and friends, then that's great news)
  
• See what else is new.
  

I'm not sure if this is something that will draw any non-Apple fan boys away from Firefox, as it's still missing a bunch of things that I have really gotten used to, both UI and things like extensions (and ad block), but it's great to see Apple bring Safari up to the level of the rest of the "next gen" browsers.

I'm going to give it a go on my Mac for a while, just to see how it is, and see if I can tell just what part of Firefox I'm so attached to. The one thing it really needs is a Firefox-like import of saved data... losing my history, saved passwords, form data, etc would really suck for a convert :(

Posted by Arcterex at February 24, 2009 09:24 AM