Safari 4 Screenshot Roundup

Apple has recently released Safari 4 beta. Before starting the review, here are some related links:

Speed Comparison:

http://lifehacker.com/5160709/browser-speed-tests-how-safari-4-stacks-up

Hidden Preferences:

http://lifehacker.com/5160709/browser-speed-tests-how-safari-4-stacks-up

There is a new start page:

It, like Chrome’s start page, auto-populates with the most often accessed pages.

The tabs are now up at the top of the window, and use Aero:

The three dots at the right bring up a menu with the tabs that are not shown.

There is a new toolbar customization menu:

You can browse your bookmarks in coverflow:

The same goes for history:

RSS feeds are in the same wonderful interface as before:

Just like in Chrome, you can drag tabs out to make new windows, or swap tabs between windows. Also like Chrome, the interface is good at getting out of the way.

Overall this is a great browser. Beware though, it is a beta and when running many tabs at once I have had it crash.

Safari 3.1.2

Safari, the default browser on every new Mac, was once the fastest browser available, arguably on any platform, at least out of beta. Now, however, it has some competition.

With Chrome using the WebKit rendering engine, as well as a new java engine, Safari has lost its speed advantage. Firefox has caught up to Safari on certain benchmarks, and Opera has always been faster on certain pages. Safari has to win on features, or else it needs to speed up. Unfortunately, Apple focused on form over function. Safari offers nothing over other browsers, there are no features not available elsewhere. Apple needs to do better with the next version to make it a competitor against Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and the Chrome derivative browsers(Iron and Chromium).

IE Marketshare Falls

Internet Explorer marketshare fell by 1.4 percentage points to 71% today. Chrome grew to 0.7%, firefox grew by 0.3% points, safari grew by 0.4% points, and opera grew by 0.01% points. It seems that all of the publicity comparing Chrome to the other alternative browsers has gotten some of the less likely users to experiment, at least that's my theory. Whatever the cause, this is good news for the opensource movement.