Safari 4 Beta is out!

[Historical Forums User]

Apple just released it for Mac and PC. Looks very cool. Seems like they’re filling some gaps that were filled by their competition and added some popular features. They have Top Sites, which is a thumbnail view of favorites like Speed Dial/Fast Dial for FF and Opera. Tabs are now on top like Google Chrome. It also sports the new web inspector. Check it out and download.

[Historical Forums User]

It’s very nice indeed. Noticeably quicker on heavy sites like digg.com. I love what the guys over at webkit are doing.

I have no doubt Firefox will come back with a counter hook. IE is down for the count though. Fingers crossed they won’t get back up :lol:

So far Chrome, Safari & Opera are really nice browsers but even though Firefox is noticeably slower for me due to my huge collection of add-ons it’s that feature alone that keeps me using it.

It’s nice to have all this competition but I’m in favour of Firefox because of its philosophy and their approach. Plus they don’t seem to have another agenda behind what they’re doing. Which unfortunately once the Google funding stops may be a huge blow for the Firefox community. :(

[Rob MacKay]

downloaded, installed, launched… anaannnndddd….

Crashed. LOL

Not had chance to try it again – but I will do now :)

[Historical Forums User]

If you have any extras like Glims or 1Password, you have to uninstall those for now or else you get crashes at launch. It’s nice that the ClickToFlash plugin still works though.

Having used it a full day, its been great, haven’t had it crash once. And it seems to render everything well and speedy. Cnet news and others are hating on it right now, but their real beef is that there’s no community with add-ons like for Firefox. It would be nice for Apple to get something like that going, if they want to be a serious browser competitor, or else their browser market share will closely resemble their Mac market share since so many "average" folks just use what’s on their system. I would imagine the Safari add-ons would look/feel nicer than the ones in the FF lot, Mac devs tend to scrutinize UI.

There’s still some things I’d like to see improved. Top Sites is cool, but it needs to be way more customizable. It’s ok I guess to have it default to fill with sites you visit most (kind of like a smart bookmarks folder), but for those who want to tell it exactly what sites you want, where you want them, it’s currently a pain. One work around is to open up the TopSites.plist and edit it, but that’s cumbersome too. Not as important, it would be nice to be able to put in your own screenshot or image.

Another teeny gripe is it’s too bad the blue progress-bar is gone, replaced with a spinner in the right side of the address field, which doesn’t give any visual feedback on the progression of the loading page.

Being able to control-tab through tabs is cool, but if your cursor is in a text area, control-tab only highlights the address bar, then control-tab again to cycle though.

[Rob MacKay]

na- I wasnt using any addons, it just died :)

But since, I have been in and yea its much prettyer than the last safari – works well, and I like the history/favs flick through :)

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