Safari 4 BETA

No love on Safari? Been out a few days and not a thread on it?
I decided to test it out since it does look pretty good. It has Chrome's tab on top feature, tearing feature, most visited sites, etc. Has Firefox's smart bar. According to the speeds test is the "Fastest browser." It is snappy but not as snappy as Chrome, imo. You Apple users will be used to this one. It has Cover Flow for History and Bookmarks. Kind of tacky but interesting. This release is very aesthetically pleasing. The most visited sites, dubbed Top Sites, is pretty nice looking, when you click a page, it makes a sort of transparent view till it finishes loading. But beware, this thing is a memory hog...uses a load of resources, but it is BETA so thats to be expected. As far as stability goes, I haven't had a crash yet, but on the other hand I don't use it much since it has no extensibility and the memory issue. All in all, it's the best Safari yet.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

 

There's a thread on it in the Apple forum that discusses both the OSX and Windows versions of it. It kind of petered out the day it was released, though.

I was impressed with it especially considering how poor Safari 3 for Windows was (the font smoothing especially was disasterous). But my major complaint with it is the same thing that I most disliked about Chrome - I can't find any easy way to change the shortcuts! It made me look more and I realized most browsers don't seem to have an easy way to change shortcuts. That really surprised me, as it seemed like a rather elementary feature to me.

So if you know how to easily configure shortcuts in Safari 4/Chrome/FF2/IE6, please tell!

And Safari 4 memory usage was astronomical. But it may well fall once it's optimized.

 

All my complaints are in the apple section.

 

Also talked about here

 

I dislike safari interface. :\

 

I like the new "Native" UI. Best looking browser on Windows Vista IMO.

It feels fast, faster than chrome-although testing by Lifehacker claims otherwise: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/Rt1VpAsMX3g/browser-speed-tests-how-safari-4-stacks-up

I also like the "Visual History" w/ cover flow.

All in all a decent browser, but not enough to take Firefox off of it's throne IMO.

You cannot choose what search engine's used in the smart search box, for example. Highlighting a piece of text on a page, right clicking and choosing search with Google in Firefox 3 opens the search results on a new tab, where it makes the most sense. In Safari, this action totally takes you away from the page you were viewing! Bigggg NO-NO! That's why I right clicked the word, I didn't WANT to leave the page I was on! There are also some page rendering issues-some pages would only display the new parts when I scrolled up and down "covering" up the previous page. I also want more (and free) add-ons.

I thought that Chrome was fast at first but got pretty darn slow over a really short amount of time, I'll have to try it out again and see what I think.

 

Safari has got nothing on FireFox

 

I really like where Safari is going and can see myself using it as my primary browser when it leaves beta and more customization options.

 

You can change the default seach box...it asks you when you first install it, or change it in preferences.

 

Browser test, including Safari 4

 

Still no option to create or move a "open new tab" button.

 

The "+" to create/open a new tab is simple though.

cheers ...

 

If you are referring to the + that is up in the top right on the tab/title bar then i find it poorly placed and would like to move it. All the buttons that I use frequently are on the other side of the screen (Back, Forward, Home) the tabs populate from left to right too. I have the same issue with IE8's Home button, tho at least I can kinda get that to the left near the other buttons tho it screws up my favorites bar.


Hardly seems intuitive. All I'm asking for is an option to allow me to put the buttons where I want. I know what works for me doesn't for you and vice-versa