At the World Wide Developer Conference today, Apple announced that they have made their browser, Safari 4, publicly available as a final release. The browser packs some rather handy new features over the old version, so we'll go over them below.First, Safari 4 is around about 4.5 times faster than the previous iteration; Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said, "The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love. Safari is enjoyed by 70 million users worldwide and with its blazing fast speed, innovative features and support for modern web standards, it's the best browser on any platform." The speed boosts come from Safari 4 being built on the Nitro javascript engine, which means it runs javascript code just about eight times faster than IE 8, and nearly four times faster than Firefox 3, according to Apple's tests.
The final version of Safari 4 has a few UI changes; these include (according to AppleInsider):
-- Top Sites, offering a visual preview of frequently visited and favorite 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.
-- Smart Address Fields for automatically completing web addresses from an easy to read list of suggestions
-- Search Fields, to 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.
If you wish to get a hold of Safari 4, please head to Apple's download page to get it as a free download for Mac OS X, or Windows.
WOOOW...
I know it runs better than before... but I'm always suspicious at Apple software for windows, safari 4 without QT is 28MB, which is alot compared to any other browser (including the other webkit chrome) and I just never understood why.
Not that I'm planning to install it but that's good to hear. They went a long way to improving iTunes on Windows earlier in the year.
WOOOW...
lolz...how?
WOOOW...
lolz...how?
as usual, apple bull****
It still is terribly designed. Apple wanted to copy Chrome's tabs, err I mean innovate, by turning the entire windowborders into huge tabs making it look ridiculous and unusable. But hey, it's Apple so everybody not loving it must be wrong.
If you don't care then why do you post here ???
Seems to me like you actually care a lot ...
isn't that gone now...
The new tab page did look quite fancy, I'll give them that.
I mean, it isn't THAT hard.
How is turning the windowborder into a huge tab, thus placing the tab title into the window glass, something which is clearly advised against in the interface guidelines conforming to the OS?
I mean, it isn't THAT hard.
How is turning the windowborder into a huge tab, thus placing the tab title into the window glass, something which is clearly advised against in the interface guidelines conforming to the OS?
Till recently Apple found that very hard! they would throw all Windows GUI conventions out the window (pun intended!) and go out of their way to make their Windows apps look, feel and behave like an OSX app.
Nope.
I am switching back to Chrome until I find a way to do that
That has nothing to do with it. The rendering engine code doesn't affect the browser design style.
Safari 4 is definitely faster than IE8 when it comes to Javascript. But it is slower than Chromium (latest build) on my system. Chromium took 716.4 ms to complete the test whereas Safari completed the test in 774.2 ms. For the javascript benchmarking you may use http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/...der-driver.html
It doesn't look much the same to me now that they moved from Safari 4 Beta's tabs on top?
Now Safari 4 looks a lot like Safari 3, actually. :p
Yes, I agree with this too, Safari and Chrome seem to follow each other pretty well in the benchmarks I've run and seen. IE 8 is pretty good at HTML and DOM rendering speeds that helps balance things up a bit, but Javascript was never its strong card.
Anyway my opinion is that javascript benchmarks mean nothing in real life scenarios, I use firefox but I still think that the fastest browser that renders pages is Opera followed by IE8.
Safari has looked like this since its initial release. The mayor interface tweaks you see today were introduced around Leopard's release.
That would be more interesting if version numbers were listed. FF 3.5 b4 and the pre-rc beta 99 are very fast...
I can accommodate that, tested were Opera 10 Beta and FF3.5 Preview, Safari 4 just blitzed them. I'm not talking about benchmarks here, I'm talking about general real world use. I don't care how many milliseconds they can run a script etc I care about how well they perform in real world applications.
Because that's basically all it is, chrome with a bit of cover flow.
But I wonder how useful that cover flow idea for history really is. It looks like it could be very cumbersome and time consuming when searching through your history (as, for me at least, the text matters more than the look as I'll forget the look).
edit, current ram usuage from test I'm doing now, I'm currently at 331mb of ram for safari on my notebook with opening my history and closing it. my wow on my 7 box is consuming 520mb of ram.. very bad memory management...
I dont like Apple much, but I think you have page open that auto refreshes or has a lot of activity going on for that to happen. RU on a blank screen or do you have a site loaded?
For the memory and CPU tests, I used 6 pages both on Chromium and Safari..Gmail, Facebook, Neowin, Gizmodo, Engadget, Tomshardware
tested on same page for all three browsers
tested on same page for all three browsers
Yes, and check out the memory increase by time as well. It can easily go up to 400 MB here. This is my only major complaint about Safari, really.
On WinXP:
1. IE8 : Total: 6239.6ms +/- 4.8%
2. FF3.10 : Total: 3419.8ms +/- 2.0%
3. Safari4: Total: 884.2ms +/- 2.5%
4. G.2.180: Total: 736.6ms +/- 11.4%
Reverse order, making Google the fastest on this system. Might not be fair since all with the exception of Safari, run their cache from a virtual RAM drive partition thus no hdd screeching and churning. If anyone knows how to relocate Safari's cache please post, there is a lot of hdd activity (per Process Explorer) each time Safari finishes loading a website - if this can't be fixed, I'm back to IE8
It appears that way. :'(
lol.
It's a thing to be a fan of a company and it's another thing to talk ****.
I honestly like MS products. I own a 360. I own a legal copy pf Vista Home Premium (not OEM but boxed retail). I owned a MS mouse in the past and liked it (curently own a Logitech g7). I use hotmail.
MS improved IE a lot lately and for everyday use like reading news and getting it's mail from Hotmail it's a nice browser.
But when someone write that it is the fastest browser it's where i draw the line between a blind fanboy and a fan.
I'm a web developper i have to deal with JS and content heavy web pages. We have a web page here with lot of content (cause the client doesn't want pagination *roll eyes*) and simple optimized JS dealing with this content and the web page is around 20 secondes slower to draw in IE 7 than Opera. And it's not a joke.
I must admit thought FF is becoming slower and slower and IE is catching up. There's still work to do for MS.
Pot, meet kettle.
Windows fanboys are not the infection here, don't forget this site started as a windows fan site. It is you arrogant MAC Fanatic are the real infection here always bashing Windows... Even your GODLY MAC is not PERFECT.
Not that I don't like Apple, but I don't really. I think I'll pass on this also.
I'll stick to IE8, K-Meleon, Opera 10b, and Seamonkey!!
I'll stick with Firefox or Opera. Never liked Microsoft.
From what i've researched this is going to become common place in all browsers, so don't be surprised if some of your fav websites start to look a little odd!
Hope you didn't like having the tabs at the top. They are gone in Safari 4 final. :'(
So, it's a great, cool, fast, good-looking, browser. Now let me tell you why I will not being using Safari 4.0: There is virtually no plugin support for the Windows platform for this browser. Not only will you not find the standards such as Adobe Flash, Acrobat, and so on, but even the most basic Java Scripts are unsupported. You are prompted repeatedly to download the plugins, only to find out that they do not exist. Thus, your pages do not always render properly. The whole experience is truly frustrating.
It is a shame that a browser this good is really not entirely available to the Windows user. Sure, you can download and install it on your computer, but without solid plugin support, it just isn't worth the time.
Source: Apple.com
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