Some browser news today - Apple have released the first Beta for the fourth version of Safari. It's new features are listed as:
- Top Sites
- Cover Flow
- Full search history
- "Tabs on top"
- Nitro Engine
- Windows native version for Windows platforms
- Developer tools
Top sites is kind of like the bookmarks toolbar - you get a limited space to display some favourites in, except the difference here is that you get previews of the sites. Could be a useful feature if it does actually show live previews. Cover Flow is great in iTunes - it's the right place for it when you've got album covers, DVDs etc for it, though I disagreed with them putting it in Finder as it seems pointless - now they've gone and included it in the browser for going through favourites - what's next? Cover Flow for switching between applications? Tabs on top is relatively wierd concept... the tabbed browsing appears at the very top of the window...and I mean the very top - they appear where the title bar usually is, though I do kind of like this design concept.
Nitro is their new rendering engine and it really does seem quite impressive. The example for their HTML rendering a page was as follows:
| Browser | HTML | iB JavaScript | Sunspider JavaScript |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safari Beta 4 | 1.06s | 0.14s | 657.07ms |
| Chrome 1.0 | 1.38s | 1.0 - 2.0s | 1.0 - 853.13ms |
| Firefox 3.0 | 3.11s | 0.76s | 3.0 - 2399.20ms |
| Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 | 3.16 | 1.04s | 1034.47ms |
| IE 7 | 3.25s | 1.81s | 19902.20ms |
| IE 8 Beta | 4.71s | 0.73s | 4137.80ms |
You should only take those figures with a pinch of salt though - you can get statistics to show almost anything so you should judge speed for yourself from using it. I also quite like the look of the developer tools so far, but I still need to use them for a while longer before I can make my mind up on whether I'll find them useful (since I'm primarily a Firefox user) but for those who develop for Safari I imagine this must be a very welcome addition.
