Safari 4 Beta web browser Review
Safari 4's Cover Flow graphical interface enables you to scroll through thumbnails of web pages
Internet Explorer’s dominance is being seriously threatened by other web browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. And with so much choice, it’s hard to imagine there’s room for yet another browser. But when the new arrival is as good as Safari 4, there’s clearly potential for one more.
Safari offers two features that instantly set it apart from other browsers. The first is raw speed. Pages load noticeably quicker than in Firefox or Internet Explorer, especially when there are plenty of images to render. This is partly down to Safari using Apple’s new Nitro engine to handle Javascript efficiently.
Don’t just take our word for it though – we compared the performance of Safari 4 with the latest beta of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Chrome and Opera, using the Acid 3 Test. Safari was the only browser to achieve the maximum score of 100, outpacing even Google’s Chrome, an impressive achievement given that Chrome was designed with performance in mind.
The second notable feature of Safari is the improved visual experience it brings to browsing the web. Managing bookmarks and viewing your history uses the same Cover Flow graphical interface found on other Apple software such as iTunes. Whereas on iTunes you flip through the cover art of your music to pick the next song, like pages in a book, Safari allows you to scroll through thumbnails of web pages, whether they are from your bookmarks or stored in your history.
Rather than automatically updating the Cover Flow thumbnail with the latest version of the page, it appears how it was when you last visited it. So, if you’ve imported a set of bookmarks, all you’ll have to flick through is the black Apple placeholder image, until you visit that page in Safari. Once you select a page, it then closes the Cover Flow interface and loads the URL in the browser window; the next time you’re going through either your history or bookmarks, you’ll see an updated preview.
This feature is something you’ll either love or hate. While we find it’s a useful addition to two of the key aspects of browsing, it won’t be to everyone’s taste. It works best on Apple’s touch-sensitive hardware, where a small flick of your finger scrolls through the interface, but on the PC you browse using the middle mouse wheel.
Safari also borrows features from other browsers. As with Chrome, you can drag and drop browser tabs into new windows or merge them together, with the mouse pointer morphing into a preview of the web page while you are dragging the tab. Sensibly, Apple has chosen to use shortcuts that mimic other browsers under Windows, so Ctrl and T opens a new tab, Ctrl and D bookmarks a page, and so on. You can also enable private browsing, where your browsing history, cookies and cache aren’t stored on the hard disk – particularly useful when surfing on a public computer.
Safari’s eye candy comes at the cost of high memory usage. With just a single page open, Safari consumed approximately 50MB, already more than other browsers, but when we turned on the Cover Flow interface and opened another dozen tabs, this shot up to 200MB. Granted, this is only a beta, but it’s safe to assume Safari 4 won’t be intended for low spec PCs, which means many netbooks might be excluded.
If your PC is powerful enough, Safari is definitely worth trying at least once. Even if the pretty thumbnail previews don’t convince you to switch from your browser of choice, the lighting-quick page loading might.
Source : PCW.Co.uk
Safari 4's Cover Flow graphical interface enables you to scroll through thumbnails of web pagesInternet Explorer’s dominance is being seriously threatened by other web browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. And with so much choice, it’s hard to imagine there’s room for yet another browser. But when the new arrival is as good as Safari 4, there’s clearly potential for one more.
Safari offers two features that instantly set it apart from other browsers. The first is raw speed. Pages load noticeably quicker than in Firefox or Internet Explorer, especially when there are plenty of images to render. This is partly down to Safari using Apple’s new Nitro engine to handle Javascript efficiently.
Don’t just take our word for it though – we compared the performance of Safari 4 with the latest beta of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Chrome and Opera, using the Acid 3 Test. Safari was the only browser to achieve the maximum score of 100, outpacing even Google’s Chrome, an impressive achievement given that Chrome was designed with performance in mind.
The second notable feature of Safari is the improved visual experience it brings to browsing the web. Managing bookmarks and viewing your history uses the same Cover Flow graphical interface found on other Apple software such as iTunes. Whereas on iTunes you flip through the cover art of your music to pick the next song, like pages in a book, Safari allows you to scroll through thumbnails of web pages, whether they are from your bookmarks or stored in your history.
Rather than automatically updating the Cover Flow thumbnail with the latest version of the page, it appears how it was when you last visited it. So, if you’ve imported a set of bookmarks, all you’ll have to flick through is the black Apple placeholder image, until you visit that page in Safari. Once you select a page, it then closes the Cover Flow interface and loads the URL in the browser window; the next time you’re going through either your history or bookmarks, you’ll see an updated preview.
This feature is something you’ll either love or hate. While we find it’s a useful addition to two of the key aspects of browsing, it won’t be to everyone’s taste. It works best on Apple’s touch-sensitive hardware, where a small flick of your finger scrolls through the interface, but on the PC you browse using the middle mouse wheel.
Safari also borrows features from other browsers. As with Chrome, you can drag and drop browser tabs into new windows or merge them together, with the mouse pointer morphing into a preview of the web page while you are dragging the tab. Sensibly, Apple has chosen to use shortcuts that mimic other browsers under Windows, so Ctrl and T opens a new tab, Ctrl and D bookmarks a page, and so on. You can also enable private browsing, where your browsing history, cookies and cache aren’t stored on the hard disk – particularly useful when surfing on a public computer.
Safari’s eye candy comes at the cost of high memory usage. With just a single page open, Safari consumed approximately 50MB, already more than other browsers, but when we turned on the Cover Flow interface and opened another dozen tabs, this shot up to 200MB. Granted, this is only a beta, but it’s safe to assume Safari 4 won’t be intended for low spec PCs, which means many netbooks might be excluded.
If your PC is powerful enough, Safari is definitely worth trying at least once. Even if the pretty thumbnail previews don’t convince you to switch from your browser of choice, the lighting-quick page loading might.
Source : PCW.Co.uk
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