Mar/095
Safari 4 beta – world’s fastest and most innovative browser
February 24th, 2009 – Apple announced the public beta release of Safari 4 for both Mac and Windows platform. The tagline “Browsing made beautiful. And smart.”, certainly is true.
Apple lists a total of 150 features that makes the latest version of its browser a definitely appealing. You can check out those features from this page.
I downloaded Safari 4 yesterday and tried it out for my daily browsing. In general, I feel that the performance is good. Web pages loads pretty fast and being an Apple product, it looks good. I have one problem with Safari though. While writing this entry in Wordpress, I found that when I want to insert a link, the “Insert/Edit Link” pop-up freezes. It just hang. The pop-up appears, but the fields are all greyed out and I’m unable to type in the URL, etc.
Another thing that I do not like is the “Tabs on Top” (as Apple called it). I don’t like the idea of having tabs on the window title bar itself (similar to Google Chrome). It just don’t appeal to me. I found that there is a way to change that from this website. I tried it last night but the result was not that good. The tab did moves away from the title bar to below the menu bar, but instead of seeing multiple tabs, I can only see one long tab with a small button on the far right which upon clicking, shows the list of the remaining tabs. (Hope you understand what I was trying to say). Anyway, I removed the changes, and keep the tabs as it is, at the “top”.
Overall, for a beta, I give Safari 4, an 8 out of 10 points. I will continue using it for a few weeks and will write another review soon after.
You may download Safari 4 beta from this link. The setup file (Safari for Windows XP or Vista) weighs a total of 25.4MB.
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6:28 pm on March 3rd, 2009
I have a few annoyances using Safari 4 Beta myself. Firstly, there is no session saver option to recover my tabs when i reopen Safari 4. Second, which is far more annoying is that for a so called tab enabled web browser, Safari got no option to force a single window mode. when you right click on a link, the “open link in new window” comes before “open link in new tab”, which is counter intuitive to tab browsing. I know about ctrl click, but thats not single window mode, its tedious browsing mode. Third, there is no option for the tab close ‘x’ button to be on the right corner of your tab instead of your left. I know this is a beta, but google chrome was a beta and there was no such nuisance in Chrome beta. Chrome beta allowed single window and session saver even though its more minimalist in design. If all these are not there, i probably use it as a 2nd browser to try for a few weeks.
6:52 pm on March 3rd, 2009
Today is my 4th day trying Safari 4. I have not been using much of Safari for the past 2 days tho. Office work took over my time. I tried Chrome last year when it was first launched, but removed it after a couple of weeks. Why??? I think, the tab at the title bar looks weird. But then, when Safari also do the same, I think it’s the trend now…
Overall, for me, Safari is nice.
9:28 am on August 25th, 2009
Apple Safari takes more resources compared to Opera and Firefox. sometimes it also freezes so i would still stick to Opera.
9:59 pm on September 28th, 2009
Safari 4 is a bit slow compared to either Opera and Firefox. but i like the interface and graphics of Safari 4, it is cool though.
10:16 pm on October 13th, 2009
i really love the layout of Safari 4. the graphics of this browser looks much better than firefox.