Review - Apple's Safari 4 Beta is
the showcase of the latest version of the underlying WebKit rendering
engine and entirely new Nitro Javascript interpreter. These now bring
Safari 4 up to date with both Firefox 3.1 Beta and Chrome in terms of speed,
even besting the two in some cases while retaining its status as a highly standards-compliant browser on the market. Apple's claim that Safari 4
Beta renders web pages 3x faster than Firefox 3 or IE7, and that it executes
Javascript 3x faster than Firefox 3 and a whopping 30x faster than IE7,
should be taken with a grain of salt, however. But, speed gains are definitely
apparent and alone justify the upgrade.

Installation removes old Safari

When you download and
run the latest beta of Safari 4 for Windows or OS X, be advised that
the installer will also automatically remove your current Safari
installation -- so you won't be able to keep the beta and current version
side-by-side on your system. Don't worry though, all your cookies, bookmarks,
history and other items will be carried over into the Safari 4 Beta. If
you later decide to downgrade to the current non-beta Safari version,
simply uninstall the beta and then download current Safari 3.2.2 for Windows or Safari 3.2.1 for Leopard. As with the upgrade, downgrading will maintain your cookies, bookmarks history and other items as well -- even with the uninstall.


First impressions

It
was Apple who originally developed the WebKit platform, which is now maintained as an
open source project. They also play a significant role in
promoting HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards for a new breed of web
applications that look and feel like their desktop counterparts -- with
rich media, graphics and fonts. The same WebKit which powers Safari can also be
found in Chrome, the Google Android browser, the Nokia Series 60
browser and Palm's webOS.

If
you use web applications a lot like I do, you'll notice in your everyday work how
Safari strictly follows web standards. Programs like Google Docs now work
without hiccups, while pages like Gmail and Facebook run snappier. I
couldn't find any major site that Safari would have trouble rendering.
If you stumble upon a page that doesn't display properly in Safari, you
can bet that its creator didn't follow web standards.

I also
noticed Safari loads sublinks within a site almost
instantaneously, like it was pre-fetching their content in advance. In
reality, the browser features speculative loading technology that loads
the documents, scripts, and style information required to view a web
page ahead of time, resulting in snappier page appearance, especially
when you visit subsections within the same site.

Safari also supports offline HTML 5 features which enable web applications to store
cloud content in a secure, searchable database locally on your computer. This allows you to continue using the application even while offline, knowing that
any changes made will be auto-synced back to the cloud when you get back
online. Google recently demoed
an experimental Gmail version with this offline mode ability that runs fine on mobile
Safari in iPhone. However, web applications that owe their offline
functionality to the Gears browser plugin instead of HTML 5
functionality, like desktop Gmail with offline mode, will lack offline capability in Safari since there is no
Gears plugin for the browser yet.


A good citizen for the "Windows World"

Apple's
applications for Windows consistently irritate PC fans by imposing Apple's
user interface guidelines, which are particularly evident in QuickTime and iTunes. While such applications appear perfectly at home in OS X,
they look and feel odd and even clunky in a Windows world where Microsoft's (not Apple's) design principles apply. With Safari 4
Beta, Apple surrenders such practice, making the browser behave
like a good citizen in the Windows world. Just like other Windows
programs, Safari features regular windows, borders, menus and toolbars.

More
importantly, Safari now finally uses Windows fonts for text
rendering -- unlike Apple's current version which forces Apple's own fonts and
rendering engine in a way that visually collides with Windows, resulting in an imperfect
text appearance that annoyed many. When you tell Safari to use Windows
Standard smoothing, found under Appearance tab in Preferences,
for example, it will let Windows handle font smoothing. Other font smoothing
settings available will kick in Apple's set of fonts and anti-aliasing
engine into action.

Cover Flow now everywhere

Cover
Flow mode first debuted in iTunes. It's a feature allowing users to navigate albums by artwork instead of names, in a manner similar to flipping through the
collection of old LP records at a local store, Apple has since brought Cover Flow to iPods and
iPhones and even OS X's Finder where it's used to flip through file
thumbnails. But, we didn't expect to see Cover Flow in a web browser, not even in
our wildest dreams. Today, it's mainly used to flip through high-quality
thumbnails of sites in your history and bookmarks. I had my doubts about the feature when I first saw it, but
I must say that Cover Flow elevates the otherwise dull task of locating a
site to new heights. Like icing on top of a cake, Cover Flow adds new
value by letting you visually recognize the site you otherwise may have a
hard time pinpointing through the usual keyword search.

You
should note that Safari only creates thumbnails of sites navigated to. If you are installing Safari 4 Beta over previous version,
you won't automatically get thumbnails for sites which appear only in your bookmarks and
history unless you visit those
sites at least once.

If you can't stand
the blank placeholder site thumbnails in Cover Flow mode (which not only
looks somewhat ugly, but really defies the whole purpose of the browsing your
history visually), then you should start over by deleting your history when installing Safari 4 Beta by choosing Reset Safari... from the Edit menu, then checking the Clear history field. The
biggest problem I can see with Cover Flow -- which is used in more than one place
in Safari -- is that users either love it or hate it. Fortunately for the
latter, it can be minimized while browsing history and bookmarks.

Read on the next page: Top Sites, Tabs management, Address and search bars, Full History Search and bookmarks management...

Top Sites, and at-a-glance site updates

Top
Sites does Opera's Speed Dial and Chrome's thumbnail of most visited
tabs at least one better. It reaches new aesthetic heights by displaying up to 24 site thumbnails on
a single page in a stunning 3D spherical grid with reflections at the
bottom. Clicking on a thumbnail allows you to visit a site, and Safari will
automatically update its thumbnail once the page loads. A star is also shown underneath a curled-up upper-right corner of each thumbnail which visually marks sites that have new
content -- serving as a great time-saver that enables you to quickly
visually grasp updated sites.

Safari figures out which sites to put in
Top Sites by tracking regularly visited sites and by ranking favorites. This allows Top Sites to reflect
evolving taste over time. There's also a handy Search History field in the lower right corner of the Top Sites window to access browsing history in Cover Flow mode.

The first time Top Sites is launched, Safari takes some extra time to create all of the thumbnails.
Each time after that, Top Sites automatically displays updated thumbnails created as you surf. While Top Sites
doesn't display live previews, you can manually update all site
thumbnails at a time by choosing Update Preview Images from the
View menu. It would be nice to have preference settings to tell Safari
to automatically update thumbnails each time you open Top Sites page,
once per browsing session or in custom-set intervals. This feature will probably be included in future versions as broadband bandwidth would allow far more bandwidth-intensive features like multiple-site loading in the midst of other, normal Internet activity.

An edit
button in the bottom left lets you set the grid size to 6, 12 and 24 thumbnails, rearrange the order and even lock thumbnails into specific positions by
clicking on their pushpins. You can also delete/mark a page to prevent
it from appearing in Top Sites. Safari won't delete the page from
your history, but rather puts it on a black list of banned URLs.
Unfortunately, Safari doesn't let you easily recover sites you
prevented from appearing in Top Sites, but tech-savvy users could edit
the list of banned URLs located in
the /Library/Safari/topsites.plist on Mac.


Tabs are on top, but all run in the same process

The
first time you load the browser you immediately notice tabs are
now positioned at window's top, just like Opera or Chrome. Named Tabs on Top,
the feature makes more room for web content while maintaining tabs
navigation -- especially if you turn off status bar at the bottom and
the address bar, bookmarks bar, menu bar and toolbar at window's top,
leaving all but tabs visible. Chrome taught me to appreciate this
precious UI tweak as invaluable improvement that reduces clutter in
order to focus what matters -- the content of web pages -- but it isn't
necessarily everyone's cup of tea. If you prefer conventional tab
placement, you'll be disappointed as Safari won't let you drag tab bar
to a custom position. Just like with Chrome, it's either Apple's way or
the highway. That said, I believe the majority of users will deem Tabs on Top as an enhancement, rather than distraction.

Closing
each individual tab requires clicking on the X symbol inside. To create a new tab, click the + button in the rightmost corner of the tab bar. Unlike
the previous Safari that lets you reposition a tab by clicking anywhere
inside it and dragging it to a new location in the tab bar, Safari 4
Beta requires you to drag a tab by its handle, which is found in tab's upper
right corner, which requires a much more precise mouse action -- hardly an improvement if you ask me. However, you can
now drag a tab into another Safari window or create a new window by
dragging the tab out to the desktop. You can now create a bookmark from
a group of tabs by choosing Add Bookmark for These X Tabs... found in the Bookmarks menu or tell Safari to open certain set of tabs every time you open a new Safari window.

Although Safari won't save your tabs on exit so they auto-reopen next time you launch the browser, you can recreate them using the Reopen All Windows From Last Session feature
in the History menu. While this is an invaluable time-saver, especially
when the browser hangs up while you had lots of tabs open, I'd prefer
automatic tab saving, like in other browsers, and in fact seems like a major problem as auto-resume browsing is a very powerful tool in modern browsers.

This leads me to the
biggest omission in Safari's engineering - tabs don't run in a separate
process. This means that it only takes one misbehaving tab to crash
entire browser. I don't know, maybe Chrome has spoiled all of us with its
isolated tab processes that let you kill a single misbehaving tab to continue
the rest of your browsing session. Once I got used to this Chrome feature, I never
wanted to look back. Because of Chrome, I can't view Safari's management of
tab processes as anything else but an inconvenience. Note also that both Opera and Firefox use a single process for all tabs.


Address and search bars play catch up with Firefox

Safari's address bar also doubles as inline progress indicator and now sports the Reload button
to save some space from the address bar, like mobile Safari on iPhone. When you
start typing in the address field, Safari lists matches drawn from your
browsing history and bookmarks separated in two distinct sections. It
also highlights the most likely match at the top so you can hit the Enter key to quickly connect.

Separate search fields now populate the list
from suggestions -- courtesy of Google Suggest -- on top of the matches found from you recent searches that are saved locally in Safari history, and the
option to search for the term itself on the current page.

Sadly, Google
and Yahoo! are still the only search engine choices built-in to Safari. I wish
Apple had combined the address and search bars into one, but it didn't. Being
a Chrome user, I constantly tried to conduct web searches via Safari's
address bar only to be greeted with URL error page. I also wish that
Apple enabled Safari with a search engine personalization and the ability
to tweak search engines with custom keywords that replace long queries
for specific searches.


Visual journey through history and bookmarks

The history
and bookmarks interface is organized as in the previous Safari, with the
addition of Cover Flow that separates a list of sites from selected
history or bookmark item in two: Upper half features high-quality
thumbnails in Cover Flow mode, while lower half displays listed
items. Directional arrows in Cover Flow let you browse forward and backward through all of the items. Alternatively, a slider lets you quickly flip through
multiple sites. If you dislike Cover Flow, you can drag it all way up
by the handle that separates the two areas, which leaves you with a
regular sites list like in previous Safari. Fortunately, Safari
remembers your custom layout each time you open the bookmarks or
history interface.

You can drag web pages from history
to your bookmarks and clear individual items. A full History Search
drills down into visited pages beyond their addresses and titles -- like in current
Safari. You can type in the search field any content of visited pages,
including image captions. In reality, I've found that Safari would let
me locate a visited page by a piece of text content in some case, but
not always. I wasn't able to determine what's causing this erratic
behavior at the time of this writing. Combined with Cover Flow, history
search narrows down sites to a few visually recognizable choices.

Bookmarks
are essentially the same as in the current Safari. Unfortunately, there
still isn't an option to sync Safari bookmarks across computers and
devices via the cloud, other than through Apple's $99 a year MobileMe suite of
online services. Other browser come with bookmarks syncing either
built-in (Opera) or gain it via a free extension (Weave add-on
for Firefox). Of course, you can always manage your bookmarks using
popular online bookmarking services like Delicious to keep them
consistent across computers, though these services are not part of the browser itself.



Read on the next page: Security and privacy, Nitro engine, CSS 3 support, Acid 3 test, Nice-to-haves, wrapping up

Still too little security and privacy controls

Safari
4 Beta brings little improvements in the security and privacy arena
over current Safari version, which is viewed by many as the least
secure browser. The biggest and way overdue addition is the new privacy
surfing mode that lets you surf anonymously without leaving activity trails on a computer. There is also built-in protection against malware
and phishing attacks that provides no control beyond preference setting
to turn it on or off, but it gets the job done. Like Firefox, Safari checks
the website you visit against publicly-maintained Google database of
known malicious sites and presents you with a prominent warning when it
recognizes the site you're visiting is potentially dangerous or a forgery (such as typing www.micorsoft.com and other common misspellings).

The
browser now accepts by the default only the cookies from the site
you're navigating to, which will protect less technically inclined
users from tracking cookies. Like current Safari, the beta also works
in tandem with the Windows Attachment Monitor technology which prompts
your antivirus software to scan download files. While the addition of
malware/phishing protection and the privacy mode brings Safari just
above our comfort level, its privacy and security features still leave
a lot to be desired. The lack of parental controls (in the Windows
version), detailed privacy features and options to selectively apply
privacy to certain sites make Safari look like a toy in this respect
compared with Opera and (especially) IE8 which remains to date the most secure browser on the market in my opinion.


Super-charged Nitro has oomph for complex web apps

Just
like Chrome's V8 and Firefox's TraceMonkey Javascript interpreters,
Safari 4 Beta also features an overhauled engine dubbed Nitro. Based on
bytecode optimization that translates Javascript code into machine
language for an optimized run-time execution following an initial pre-compile, it shows significant
speed gains over current Safari version which are interpreted, and is roughly comparable
in performance with that of current Chrome or the latest Firefox 3.1 beta.

I haven't yet conducted precise, comprehensive testing, but what I've found
so far is Safari 4 Beta runs all heavy sites like Gmail, Facebook and Apple's
MobileMe noticeably faster, with a snappier UI than the previous Safari. It
definitely feels faster than the current Firefox, and is on par with Chrome
and Firefox 3.1 beta. On its part, Apple claims Nitro
executes JavaScript 4.2x faster than Safari 3, 6x
faster than IE8, 4x faster than Firefox 3.1 and a whopping 30x faster than IE7. I'd subjectively have to say,
based on few hours of use so far, that Nitro brings tangible speed gains, but
perhaps not as many as Apple claims.


CSS 3 support for nice eye-candy