A Small Review Of Safari 4 Beta

Posted February 25, 2009 – 4:18 pm in: Freeware, Software

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As you know, Safari 4 Beta was released few hours back and it’s time to put hands on the new browser which has seen lot of improvements in the Beta release.

The website claims Safari as “World’s fastest browser” and “will execute JavaScript 30 times faster than IE 7”. The features that can be rated as “good” are many, but some features are almost like Google Chrome.

Apple has revamped the user interface of the browser to give Windows native look. Apple has learnt fast from the Chrome that the users are more comfortable with the top tabs and also the simple look. So you will see all the tabs on the top like Google Chrome.

There are many new features in the browser to mention but only a few features actually impress the end user. Two features that I personally liked are Top Sites & advanced History & Bookmark features that stores the thumbnail image of the web pages.

Top sites feature lets you access the favorite sites that you have opened most. Top site feature can be accessed by clicking “Top Sites” button at the left top pane. Users can also customize the number of sites Safari displays on your Top Sits page by clicking the edit button in the top sites page.

Users are allowed to choose three different thumbnail views to customize the top sites page. And also you can pin the site preview thumbnail to specific locations by clicking the pushpin button that appears over the site preview. Clicking on the thumbnail preview will open the web page.

It’s worth to note that Safari is the first — and only — web browser to pass Acid 3. Acid 3 tests a browser’s ability to fully render pages using the web standards used to build dynamic, next-generation websites, including CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SVG.

Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.

Another key feature of Safari 4 Beta is its ability to show the previously visited pages with previews, which makes it very easy to find out the web pages that you are looking for. User need not to look into the huge history list, but can browse thought the preview of the WebPages.

Safari Beta 4 was taking over 150 MB of RAM with just three tabs opened, which states that it’s not light on your system. Though it is far better than Safari 3, it can’t be used as an alternative to Firefox due to the obvious reasons.