“Apple Inc.’s decision to offer a public beta of its new Safari 4 Web browser — available for Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista — caught the tech world by surprise. Even more surprising are the number of innovative features it offers, including in-your-face browser interface advances, under-the-hood updates for notably speedy rendering performance, and open-standards compliance,” Ryan Faas reports for Computerworld.
“The changes to tabs and the Top Sites feature will naturally invite comparisons to Google’s Chrome, which was introduced last fall and is available only for Windows. Chrome, like the new Safari, also places multiple tabs at the top of a window and offers a similar gallery view of recent sites. But simply seeing Safari’s new interface as something cribbed from Chrome is a bit unfair; Apple has provided its own take on both concepts that seems inspired as much by the mobile version of Safari included on the iPhone and iPod Touch as by Google Inc.,” Faas reports.
“I’ve used Safari 4 for less than 36 hours at this point, and I’m sold. It has a collection of innovative additions, performance boosts and standards compliance. It also has features that look like the love child of the iPhone OS and an action/sci-fi movie. Those cutting-edge advances make Safari 4 fun to use, but only because the browser backs those interface elements with a solid underpinning,” Faas reports.
Read the comprehensive full review – recommended – here.
