It renders web pages at lightning speed. It works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac and PC. It shows you your favorite sites almost instantly. Apple has released Safari 4, billed as the world's most innovative browser.
Safari was first released as a public beta in January, 2003 and has been Apple's default browser since Mac OSX 10.3 "Panther". In June of 2007 Apple surprised a lot of critics by releasing a version of Safari for Windows. At the time of the writing of this article Safari holds a 8.43% market share compared to 6.31% this time last year.
With the release of Safari 4 we see many new features and improvements:
- Top Sites
- Cover Flow
- Speculative Loading
- Improved CSS Support
- Nitro Javascript
- Improved Developer Tools
In the following sections I'll take a closer look at some of the more interesting features of Safari 4.
Top Sites is one of the more innovative features we see with the release of Safari 4. Other features, such as improved rendering with Apple's WebKit and speculative loading, are equally as impressive but the user does not directly interact with these improvements so they tend to get less attention.
Top Sites is basically a wall of thumbnail pages that reflect your browsing history. The longer you use Safari 4 the better results you will get on the Top Sites page. Over time the Top Sites page will contain a very accurate record of what sites you visit most. The website thumbnails are updated frequently to reflect new content and enable you to visit the site with a click of your mouse.
One of the things I like most with the Top Sites page is you can assign a static thumbnail to always be displayed on your Top Sites. For example, if you wanted http://www.brighthub.com/ to always be displayed on your Top Sites page you simply click the edit button, found at the bottom left corner of the page, and 'pin' BrightHub. This will ensure BrightHub stays on your Top Sites page regardless of your browsing history. You can also delete a website from your Top Sites page by clicking the X beside the pin.
Overall the Top Sites page is a nice addition to an already impressive browser. Once you get use to the interface it is a handy tool for accessing your favorite websites quickly, and lets be honest, like Cover Flow which we will discuss in the next section, the 'cool' factor of the Top Sites page alone will make it one of the most talked about additions to Safari 4.