Martin @ Blog

Today Apple introduced the first beta version of Safari 4. While I didn’t read much about this new upcoming browser, I am really enthusiastic about the new features of this browser. I was waiting for Google Chrome to come to the Mac, since I really like lightweight browsers, but Safari made the waiting unnecessary.
Safari 4 has major improvements in speed. According to the press release, the Javascript engine is three times faster than the one in Safari 3 and faster than the one in Firefox. Also the rendering of HTML is faster (according to Apple) and I think I can even notice this improvement.
Another change is that tabs are now on top of the window, so they do include the address bar (which is a big improvement usability wise).
The new browser contains all kind of graphic hotness, including coverflow for bookmarks and history and a 3d-like display of most visited webpages in every new tab of window.
What I personally really like in the new Safari 4, is the improved web developer tools. Safari 4 contains a Firebug-alike interface for every webpage, which enables you to inspect elements, view scripts, profile javascript, debug javascript, see load times and much more. I think with this improvement, Safari is one of the browsers which provides best support for web developers. You can try it for Windows and Mac OS X by downloading it from the Apple site.

Update – I already noticed that Safari 4 was fast, but according to these benchmarks, Safari 4 is really fast. In fact, the JavaScript performance is better than Google Chrome and 42 times faster than IE 7.

Tags: Apple, browsers, safari, web development, webkit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 19:30 and is filed under English, Webdevelopment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.