“Safari 6 packs relatively few new features for a major browser update, and most of its shiny new bells and whistles need Mountain Lion to run properly,” Nathan Alderman writes for Macworld.

“Like Firefox, Safari has consolidated URLs and searches in a single bar at the top of the screen. You search with Google by default, but can specify Yahoo! or Bing in preferences,” Alderman writes. “Unlike Firefox, Safari doesn’t keep a vestigial search box hanging out next to its all-in-one window for no apparent reason. I liked Safari’s useful, unobtrusive implementation of this idea.”

Alderman writes, “Under Mountain Lion, Safari 6 attains striking poise. The blue progress bar once stuttered across the URL bar; now it glides. Pages slide even more smoothly as you swipe (on a trackpad) to navigate. And the contents of a page seem to pour into place as it loads. Aside from an odd habit of a split-second fade-out and fade-in while the browser reloads a page you’ve just moved forward or back to, everything feels fast and fluid, even on a 2008 laptop. Apple has made Safari 6 on Mountain Lion the Mac’s most visually polished browser.”

Much more in the full review here.