Safari 4 released today, offering 'unparalled speed'
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted June 8th 2009 12:32PM
posted June 8th 2009 12:32PM
Among the torrent of news is the announcement that Safari 4 ships today, boasting "unparalleled speed," especially when compared to IE8 (this is Apple talking, not us). Included in the new browser is a full history search, featuring a cover flow view of the user's browsing history (as well as a full spotlight search). And it looks like they've thought a lot about the browser when building the new OS -- In Snow Leopard, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, "boosting performance by up to 50 percent." Also in SL, Safari plug-ins run as separate processes. When a plug-in crashes, the browser remains intact, meaning you can just reload the page, not the browser itself. Available today (as in, right now) for Leopard, Tiger, and -- of course -- Windows.
I'm impressed, I'm using it right now. What is great for me, I have three media center PC's. I enlarge the fonts so they are readable from a distance of 10-15 feet. Other browsers take up too much useless space for the title bar, tabs etc. This is way more compact. I'm not an apple fan be any means, but this is promising.
How does moving the Stop/Refresh button away from the other navigation buttons make any logical ui sense? The new loading message adds another distracting element while actually giving you less information than the clever URL loading animation. You can't remove or move the favorite button either - move the stop reload button I use hundreds of times a day across the browser, but force me to have the fav button right between fwd/back and the url...
At least they put the tabs back where they were - although they choose to replace the nice round close button with a very WindowsXP-like square.
Hopefully someone will find terminal hacks to put things back, but I already tried the ones for the Beta with no luck.
It really feels like I'm running FireFox with a knockoff Safari theme installed. Yuck.
iMac here and it's so damn slow now...
i liked the tabs on top. why take them away? so sad :(. i'm moving to the developer version of chrome.
ernie, the apple has spoken, tabs are bad, I suggest selling your laptop and going back to a commodore if you want OLD TECHNOLOGY!
@Mitch wtf, stop eating crack.
@ernie Yea, tabs at the top were great, missing them too. I wonder if it's possible to put the back 'on top' (see what I did there) from some .plist.
Now use FireFox for the plugins - but Safari 4 is clearly faster than all other browsers. Sites feel much snappier.
The tabs on top and multi-touch trackpad support were the only things keeping me with Safari. Now they're gone. I'm moving to Firefox 3.5.
I don't have a Mac machine, so I am not sure about the Mac OS version, but the Windows version of Safari 4 looks almost exactly like Chrome. Even the 'Top Sites' screen is just fancier looking 'Most Visited' screen on Chrome ... I like it though, but I still prefer Chrome.
ill stick with chrome
Woop
Seems Safari 4 doesn't like changing home page other than Apple's page, just after changed the home page to google it consumes 99% cpu and freezes when click next tab.
http://www.host-images.com/u/files/12pove5bqa5ov6qlt0pu.jpg
Just upgradet to Safari 4 on my mbp. Within the last hour it has crashed 3 times. What a piece of junk!!!
It actually feels slower if not the same.
Beating Internet Explorer in speed is like being smarter than Paris Hilton.
Doesn't mean anything; nobody cares.
I can't get tabbed browsing to work at all. When I click a link in an e-mail for instance, it opens in a new window. I have everything set up the way they say to. I am running Vista 64.
How do you get to the top list
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