Apple released the first public beta of their web browser, Safari. Safari 4 beta has a few changes, both in appearance and speed.
The first difference is the location of the tabs for browsers. The old location for the tabs was just under the bookmarks bar, where now the tabs are located at the top of the screen. Which is different. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad yet, as I’ve just started using it.
The second difference is the ability to drag tabs into a new windows. Let’s say for instance you are browsing macgasm.net and you find something you want to learn more about, but you’ve already got 4 or 5 (maybe more) tabs and you don’t want to mix up all of the content. Just Click and Drag the tab into a blank area, and poof, a new windows appears with that tab. Now you can keep better control of your content without having to open a new windows and do any copy and pasting to get everything situated properly.
The last improvement made is in terms of speed of the browser. Not just in terms of javascript processing, but in terms of general speed. With the limited amount of time that I have had to play with the browser I have noticed that it does seem to render pages faster and general speed of the browser is vastly improved. I haven’t made it crash yet, but who knows, I can find a way to do so.
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is a beta. There will be problems and it’s not generally recommended to run beta software on a production machine. So, just keep that in mind. But if you’re brave feel free to give Safari 4 Beta a go and see the differences.
Here are the requirements for Safari 4 from the Apple.com/safari/download website
* Any Mac running Security Update 2009-001 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11
* Mac with an Intel processor or a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor and built-in FireWire®
* 256MB of RAM
* Top Sites and Cover Flow on Mac OS X Tiger require a Quartz-Extreme compatible video card. More details
You can download the beta from Apple’s Safari Page. It is available for both Windows and Mac.
