MacGeek – Safari 4 Public Beta available
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
On Tuesday, Apple released the public beta of it’s Safari web browser. There are a few new features including top-tabs, Top Sites, and a faster overall experience.
Top-sided tabs are a little odd if you’re used to the traditional location just above the current window. It may take some adjustment, but it does seem to free up some real estate for the page currently being viewed.
Top Sites is a contact-sheet-style page that displays the internet’s most popular sites. You can’t add specific sites, but it does learn your visiting habits. Initially it lists sites such as: Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and eBay, but just visit your favorite geeky site (geekshow.us of course) a few times and pretty soon it will show up on Top Sites.
You can change the size of Top Sites to display 6, 12 or 20 webpages.
Another nice feature is the ability to search or browse your history in a Cover Flow-style view. Very nice if you want to go back to that one site, and you don’t remember the name, but you remember what the site looked like.
I’ve been using Firefox for the past few months because Safari 3 was just too slow, and the longer I left it running, the slower it got. The last few days I have basically been running Safari and I have had absolutely no issues. No slowdowns, no bugs, and no crashes.
Available free for MacOSX 10.5 and Windows. Download it here.
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I’ve installed this today and have been giving it a test run. I’m a big fan of Safari and use it way more than any other browser. This beta version is very good. It’s quick and I like the Top Sites function, a lot.. The first time I selected the Top Sites, all of my regular pages appeared with excellent preview images to show what the latest page looks like.
Apple have also fixed the annoying problem of not having a quick way to open up a new tab. Just clicking on the + now does this (and seems to kick off the Top Sites in the new window for quick access to your regular pages).
Overall the beta is a nice improvement on the last version. I’ll do some serious surfing over the next few days to test it’s stability.
As far as I know cmd+t (Mac) and CTRL+t (Windows) opens a new tab. This option might have to set in preferences, but this keyboard shortcut is how I *always* open new tabs/windows.
I did notice that I cannot insert a link using the Wordpress interface. I sent in a “bug” report. I’m not sure since this is a beta if that matters.
It could be a java issue. I can enter link information, but I cannot click the “insert” button to complete link insertion.
i really love the layout of Safari 4. the graphics of this browser looks much better than firefox.
I have safari for windows and i LOVE it.