Jun 8th A quick look at the new Safari 4
To begin with the end: I like it. Quite a bit. First impression is that it might not be quite up there with Firefox in terms of features, but it definitely is more elegant. I’ve decided to use it as my main browser this week, and see if I will want to switch.
Pros
Really, really, really fast rendering engine. I mean visible to the human eye, not just stats and number. And it has a nice standard support too.
Elegant. Stays out of your face. The antithesis of IE8 in other words.
Some people, including myself, had issues with the beta version’s “loading wheel.” It was hard to see if a page was still loading or not. That’s not an issue anymore
The top-mounted tabs, a la Chrome, are gone. Thank god. Never been a fan of them, and the reasoning behind them makes little sense, other than saving 1/4 of an inch of screen space.
“Top Sites” looks awesome. As does the “Cover Flow” feature in Bookmarks and History.
Cons
No “Awesome Bar” features, i.e. no wildcard URL/title search in the address bar. Too bad, as I use this religiously in Firefox.
No bookmark keywords. For example, in Firefox I have Internet Movie Database registered to “imdb %s.” This lets me type in “imdb Cary Grant” in the location bar, and an IMDb search for Cary Grant will show up.
No add-ons.
Conclusion
The more I use it, the more I like it. Safari might be my browser of choice come next week.
I really like that there’s a webkit browser that now has the fast-scroll thing (tap mousewheel + drag), a thing that I sorely missed when using Safari and Chrome before.