Safari 4 adds a touch of flair

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 24 Feb 2009 at 15:21

Apple has released the first beta of Safari 4, with the company promising faster browsing and the company's trademark visual flair.

Among the headline features of Safari 4 is the Nitro rendering engine, which Apple claims will render Javascript intensive pages up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3.

The company also claims Safari will trounce the opposition when it comes to loading HTML web pages, touting a three times improvement on both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.

Away from Apple's bluster it certainly feels nippy, but we'll hold fire on proclaiming a winner until we've had a chance to test it properly.

The visual embellishments are much more evident. Though we found the new Windows-specific design unpleasantly chunky and bland, the Favourite Site's page and Website History have had more positive makeovers.

The Favourites Page displays a concave wall of thumbnails showing your frequently visited sites, resplendent with shadows and reflections.

Elsewhere, the history section of the browser now has a Cover Flow display, which allows users to flip through their visited web pages as they would the covers of their albums on an iPod. Bizarrely, it turns out to be a far more useful feature within Safari, allowing you to quickly locate a webpage that you can visualise, but can't recall the details of.

Safari 4 also supports HTML 5, making it compatible with the next generation of offline web apps being crafted by Google.