Welcome to the future, Safari fans, because the Safari 4 beta just hit the download shelves and it’s ready to tear some things up in Tiger and Leopard and even Windows. The download requires the latest security patch (2009-01) but other than that you’re ready to ride. Guess what? Javascript is 4X faster!
UPDATE – Now with video.
And that’s not all. The press release appears below but here are the major updates. I’ll install it and give you the details as soon as everything reboots:
* Top Sites – a visual representation of all of your frequently visited pages (warning: could be NSFW for some)
* Full History Search – an index of every single page you’ve visited including titles, URLs, and text
* Cover Flow – iTunes like browsing for your bookmarks and history
* Tabs on Top – A more intelligent method for tabbed browsing.
Apple Announces Safari 4—The World’s Fastest & Most Innovative Browser
New Nitro Engine Runs JavaScript More Than Four Times FasterCUPERTINO, California—February 24, 2009—Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.
“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”
Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.*
Apple is leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 for an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.
Safari for Mac, Windows, iPhone™ and iPod® touch are all built on Apple’s WebKit, the world’s fastest and most advanced browser engine. Apple developed WebKit as an open source project to create the world’s best browser engine and to advance the adoption of modern web standards. Most recently, WebKit led the introduction of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards and is known for its fast, modern code-base. The industry’s newest browsers are based on WebKit including Google Chrome, the Google Android browser, the Nokia Series 60 browser and Palm webOS.
* Innovative new features in Safari 4 include:
* Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;
* Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;
* Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes®;
* Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
* Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
* Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
* Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;
* built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
* a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.Pricing & Availability
Safari 4 is a public beta for both Mac OS® X and Windows and is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari.Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard® version 10.5.6 and Security Update 2009-001 or Mac OS X Tiger® version 10.4.11, a minimum 256MB of memory, and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire®. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari.
*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted on an iMac® 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows Vista, with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test. HTML benchmark based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
I really like Safari. On windows and Macs. But I don’t use it much since I develop websites and am always using Firebug on Firefox. Plus I find Chrome to have the best user interface, but I am happy to see Safari making such advancements.
Check out their new web inspector built into the browser. Very mature and very Firebug-like.
I completely agree with Timothy. Firebug, Web Developer tools, Error console, even the color-coded source listing make Firefox my choice for developing Websites. On Safari, I like the DOM explorer. On windows, I prefer to use Chrome because it’s crash-proof. See my post — http://larryaronson.com/2008/two-new-browsers/
As a real developer, you need to use IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Every page and app needs to work cross-platform.
For debugging tools, each has its own flavor with strength and weaknesses. I find the combination works great to resolve problems. No single browser does the job.
As a user, Safari is the prettiest, fastest, coolest.
You’ve been spending too much time in corporate meetings.
Good design sense should adhere to basics in any regard.
I love firebug, too, so powerful when checking the html. However, as a webmaster, I think I still need to install all kind of browsers, including safari, to testing.
“Welcome to the future”?? Please….
Firefox is the real browser. For any web developer, making the website work in FireFox and IE is the highest priority. As usual…Safari is again good to look at and nice way to kill time…nothing more.
http://www.livbit.com
Safari has the best engine around : webkit.
Since Webkit is also the base for Chrome, the iPhone browser, future Palm Pre browser, Google Android, and many other smartphones to come, ignoring Safari/Webkit browsers is just silly.
Now, if only they had some sane plugin framework…
ouhh… i agree 100% with you!
apple leads the pack
Yeah, I can’t switch from FireFox for actual browsing because I have way too many plugins and CSS stylesheets customizing how my experience is and how my browser looks. FF’s interface is even customizable via CSS. Safari just isn’t. It has some nice features, but it’s still not going to replace browsing for me.
Testing yes, and I’ll continue programming games in it since its JavaScript engine is the fastest and most featured, plus CSS3 is awesome for that stuff. WebKit is also integrated into a lot of OS X apps like Fluid, Bowtie, Dashboard itself…
I do wish FireFox would dump their engine and adopt WebKit. And then IE. And everyone. It’s not the browser that’s the problem, it’s the engine. And WebKit is simply the most advanced and full featured one. If there was ONE engine, we wouldn’t have the web programming problems we have now. Imgine, no more having to test on every browser. You’d only need one. WebKit. The wave of the future. Like Lisa Simpson.
Who needs this? The speed improvements I already get by running the webkit nightlies. The interface changes seem to be just fluff. Oh well. The browser is so mature at this point that there isn’t really room for real innovation it seems.
99% of users won’t have any idea what the webkit nightlies are, let alone how to use them. Nor will they be especially bothered about it.
Most Safari users will probably appreciate the user interface improvements too. I don’t use Safari myself – I’m quite happy with Firefox – but it sounds a lot of people will do well out of this update.
Apple???? fluff??? :-)
yeah, I agree, the browser is going on 15 years old. Innovation is not going to happen at the level that the average user would even notice, rather at the scripting and rendering levels. It’s become an application platform, a thin client and a source of frustration for all scripters everywhere :)
I agree with the WebKit endorsement. Let the plebs enjoy Safari 4, I’ll keep on trucking with WebKit.
Running this next to my nightly Webkit and they both seem to be about the same speed. But I do agree, with the nightly builds I expect Webkit to pull back ahead in about a month.
And who does not wish to pay for a hosting, is urgent here – the best free web hosting!
Eh..
For me, just not worth the bla of another browser… no plugins? terrible text-based view-source, seems to be rather quick though.
Hmm, whatever.. better to have other options. Checking the site now.
That’s not an article, it’s a press release.
Great to hear that! Safari is really wonderful but it still loses its market share to the mighty Windows.
Safari is a browser and windows is an operating system. Windows IE causes more problems for developers than it is worth and unless it changes its ways will soon loose out to FireFox
If only Gmail work in it!
???
it does !
Not for me! Neither Gmail nor my company’s Apps-mail will load past the authentication in Safari 4.
Are you running Google Gears? I had the same problem, and had to go to Safari->Google Gears Settings in the menu, and remove mail.google.com in the Gears Settings popup.
Then, I connected to GMail just fine, and was able to turn Gears back on for GMail.
gmail works fine for me on the new safari.
hotmail doesn’t work though
Seems like Apple gets the Coverflow feature to every program.
I will try it.
Till some months ago I was rather skeptical about Safari but, despite I still use Firefox, I finnd Safari more responsive and fast in certain situations. The only thing i dont like is its minimalist theme, but well who cares when the browser is just great??
I’m really liking what I’ve seen of Safari 4 beta on Windows so far… cannot wait to get home and give it a shot on my Mac.
I’ve not cared much for past versions of Safari, but this might just change everything. ;)
This is a terrific release and especially great for Windows users. While it is certainly not perfect (a decent plug-in infrastructure would be appreciated), it brings innovation and Apple’s patented sex-appeal to an otherwise stodgy category of software. See also: Scrapplet and xWinLib Announce Support for Apple’s New Safari Release
Steve Repetti
http://www.radwebtech.com
I am loving this, but I can’t figure out how to take advantage of the new views. I’m going crazy here because I can’t find anything on it.
I can’t figure out why the deal is. I watched that video you posted and it doesn’t look like I even have the right buttons to enable the new views. Is anyone else confused or am I totally missing this? I’m running XP by the way.
The new top pages view can be accessed by opening a new tab, or by pressing the button located between the bookmark menu and the Apple link in the bookmark nav bar.
History “Cover Flow” opened by default when I opened up the history page.
I am running windows xp on a PC and I do not see cover flow, top pages or any of the new “stuff”
What the heck am i doing wrong?
No buttons here either – also on XP. Tried a new tab but nothing….
No coverflow option in History either…
I think new features only for Mac OSX
Nope, it is available in Windows XP as well. Looking at the features right now.
It looks like Apple copied an extension for Firefox named FoxTab.
Amazing how similar it looks like.
Yeah, and the private mode in Firefox 3.1 is copied from Safari.
The Awesome Bar in firefox is copied from Opera
The Speed Dial like in Chrome is copied from Opera
So ?
P.S. : i tried to find a feature Opera copied from another browser but couldn’t remember one.
i’m not a great fan of the Opera browser but i must admit that they try to innovate.
but i guess opera did copy a feature from another browser anyway.
Apple didn’t care/dare to include Opera in the browser comparison tests.
AFAIK Opera 10 Alpha was the first to clear Acid 3 Test.
I have already submitted 4 bug reports to Apple.
ANd here are two screenshots of this horrible browser running on my PC to prove it:
Borked Top Sites View:
http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/22224/safariEpicFail.jpg
Drop down menu fail:
http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/22224/safariDropDownBug.jpg
Oh and the browser has already crashed on me trying to watch an HD video.
And I have been using the browser for 5 minutes.
It’s not the browser that’s horrible. It’s your Windows PC that’s probably horrible.
@ zerosum1975
No, it’s the browser that’s horrible.
@ Jake
No, it’s the Windows OS that’s horrible.
well then they should not have tried to use a texture to render a webpage to…
its your graphics card/drivers that maybe at fault
john
Ummm, it’s beta. There are going to be bugs. That makes it horrible? If you want fewer bugs, don’t use beta software.
Safari 3 also has a problems with drop-downs and other form handling weirdness. It’s one of the reasons I switched to Firefox as my primary browser. I was sick of not being able to buy thing online because of browser incompatibilities.
I admit that this issue may be on the side of the website, but I don’t care. All I know is that there are a lot of sites that do not work in Safari that do work fine in Firefox.
I should also point out that Safari’s Flash implementation is subpar. Many of Safari’s frequent crashed seem to be related to Flash.
I’m still trying to decide whether or not I like the new “Tabs on Top” feature. I have it enabled, for now, but I wanted to see if I could disable the new feature and managed to find a hidden preference for disabling it:
http://observationpoint.org/articles/2009/02/24/disable-tabs-on-top-feature-of-safari-4-0-public-beta/
Great find, thanks!
The new Safari on Windows is ugly, but blends into Windows XP default theme pretty well. It’s mimicking Chrome in a lot of ways.
In XP is there anyway to make the “Tabs on Top” feature look like Safari and not the horrible blue Windows XP look.
It looks just like chrome to me.
Big and bulky and not the small grey and tidy Safari look.
Safari 4 is really really fast. I just wish it had support for plugins and other search engines. That’s why I always end up back with Firefox.
still it cant pwn firefox
i love firefox
yeah, bloated slow browsers that crash a lot are awesome!
To the author of the article —
What is hell?
* Top Sites – a visual representation of all of your frequently visited pages (warning: could be NSFW for some)
If you have nothing else to write just say I am pasting the press release here. NSFW for some?? Really? What journalism trick did you use to figure that out?.
wow, I just installed the safari 4 beta, looks really fast, compare w/ chrome.
looking forward to its final version.
“nnovative new features” copied straight from Opera and various Firefox plugins…
no plugin, no good.
god, when will apple wake up?
Looks cool but I wonder how slow it will be on an older GX Tower.
For the first 5 minutes, it ran perfectly…but now when I try iGoogle it’s all jumbled.
Why bother? really!
Been There, Seen That, Done That.
Firefox has this for 6 months already:
http://www.foxtab.com
Wah ! amazing Safari coverflow !
I like Safari even better now. I use Firefox because of its popularity and as a developer I need to make sure my sites work on the most popular browsers but iTunes like browsing for your bookmarks and history is better than a host of plugins (though I would like to have the plugins too).
Considering how underhanded Apple is, it wouldn’t surprise me if they hacked in and added to the Ubuntu repositories too.
You’re not making any sense.
Firebug rocks Firefox, but it renders fugly text on the browser. It’s also more stable. However, they miss one tiny but awesome feature of IE – the ability to add a new tab without drop down or right clicking. Minor but very very useful.
IE – renders sites beautifully, but unstable and crashes all the freaking time. Also not laying nice with Flash lately.
Safari- pretty, but has its own quirks. Very tough for webmasters to maintain for a very small % of users.
Opera- say wha?
Chrome- just, why? Why do we need another browser to maintain???
Sorry, did you really just write “IE renders sites beautifully” and “Safari is tough for webmasters”. I can only assume you’ve never written a website, let alone seen any of the IE hacks needed for even the most basic of layout workarounds.
For the record: Safari (WebKit), Opera, Firefox, Chrome – very easy to write standards web pages for.
IE – massive heap of crap that can barely render it’s own name reliably.
Downloading it now, but I’m not to excited about the Windows native look-and-feel. Safari has long had the best text rendering on the web. Why would they take that away from us?
Hi,
Can anyone help with enabling ‘Top sites’ & ‘Cover Flow’ feature in Safari 4 running on Win XP SP2.
I have already installed DirectX 9.
still dont see any option for Cover Flow.
BR,
Roshan
iBench is BS. Look it up and see why Apple uses it.
sorry, but it’s all about firefox and it’s mass amounts of addons. Puts the other browsers to shame. Don’t get me wrong.. Im a fan of apple, but not safari.
can’t stop playing with the new safari beta. love the top sites and history cover flow. can’t wait for the final version.
Although claimed by Apple as fastest browser, I dont think its qiute that fast! I have used many other browsers and feel that google crome is the fastest of them all. By the way they have added new features such as “cover flow” which I like very much.
In HTML 5 media support, which codecs does Safari support? In firefox it’s Theora and Vorbis.
Too bad the security update and Safari 4 Beta is causing my cpu to run at 100% even after 4 reboots!!
Glad the rest of you are enjoying it though.
Hi, can anybody get Gears working on Safari 4 Beta? I am trying to do that for offline gmail access with no luck. Gears site does not have any links.
I ditched both Safari and Firefox for Opera browser, it really is the best browser in the world.
It feels allot more like Chrome now then Safari on Windows.
Which I don’t know if I like or hate yet. It feels kind of strange.
It’s really fast now. Last version was on windows to slow. Anyway. I will still use firefox. There are a few very useful addons. I can’t live without them.
How do I get rid of the black box that takes up one third of the page on each bookmark folder? A real pain in the neck.
100% in the Acid3, the first mainstream implementation of HTML5 offline and database storage and X4 Javascript. with a set of developer tools to rival Firebug…
This is not just any old update….it’s actually the most advanced browser available today. Well ahead of the pack, I’m afraid.
Consider me switched, sir.
Who wants to bet? Snow Leopard will come on Touchscreen lappies and desktops!!!
Jaunty has to pick up the pace (The feature is there but where’s the magic?)… 7? We’ll see about that in a few months.
lol u guys are jerks. Safari mimics Crome lol. You do know that Crome just arrived on the block right ;O) Hint Crome took a great deep look at Safari and copy pasted. Anyway who cares about Crome, it is nothing but a kid browser you use for fun.
I’m looking forward to trying out the new firefox. I switched from IE years ago due to the better overall security it offers. This one should be even better. I use justaskgemalto to stay up to date on digital security/data protection/etc.
Tried for 2 days to love Safari 4, but one thing sent me back to Opera: Safari’s infuriating habit of opening window after window after window, whereas in Opera, it just opens new tabs. Any way to fix this in Safari?
try this tips..it works for me. No more new windows on “_blank” links
http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/how-to-force-safari-4-to-open-links-in-a-new-tab-instead-of-a-new-window/