When Apple came out with the Safari 4 beta during the week it was certainly a surprise. I don’t think anyone say it coming, and aside from a striking similarity to a certain other browser out there, it’s certainly a unique offering from Apple. The biggest change is of course the top tabs. When I first downloaded it and tried it out I almost didn’t notice them. I was actually looking for the option to turn tabs on, not realizing that they were already there. But once you do, it takes a bit of getting used to the new location. At first | didn’t like it, but once you get used to it, they’re fine. And if nothing else you get back a little bit of screen real-estate.
The more confusing thing for me though was the moving of the stop, reload and status markers into the address field, which is a bit weird. I also miss the blue progress bar, and I hope Apple decide to bring that back for the final version, although there is a hidden preference you can use to get it back.
Performance wise the browser is definitely much snappier than its previous version. I had recently started using firefox as my main browser because of the infamous safari cookie issue, and I had been impressed by the page rendering speed in firefox. However, the recent security update has fixed the cookie issue (at long last) and combined with the new speed of safari 4 it’s good to be home as it were.
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