Apple releases Safari 4.0 BETA

Apple has today announced the BETA release of Safari 4.0 for both Mac and PC.

New features include—

Top Sites

A quick way to view at a glance the websites you visit most with markers indicating even which ones have been updated since your last visit. This is fantastic as I often find myself checking and re-checking certain sites to see if anything has changed. I wonder if I might even start using this feature to view blogs instead of using the RSS feeds which basically omit all the creative elements of the website they belong to.

Cover Flow

It's available in in iTunes, on the iPhone and iPod Touch and in the Finder and now we can browse our bookmarked websites and browsing history in beautiful Cover Flow style. This is pretty cool although I'm not sure how truly useful it will be.

Full History Search

You can now search through all the past pages you have viewed with full text search as well as a thumbnail of each page you visited to make them easy to find. I often find myself digging through my history or re-searching through Google to find a page I had viewed recently but just cannot locate.

Speed Improvements

Apple is touting their new "Nitro Engine" to delivery "blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies." I have noticed the use of AJAX in certain sites can really slow down the browser so I'll be curious to see how this improves things.

Windows Native Look and Feel

Hmm! I wonder how many people saw this coming a few years back—before the iPod. It's interesting to see Apple slowly infiltrating the PC world.

Developer Tools

This is really cool. I've often used the dev tools in Safari 3.0 but they are pretty incomplete so I'm looking forward to having what Apple calls "the best set of development tools ever included in a browser." If you're interested, full details can be found in the Safari Dev Center.

Full Page Zoom

It'll be interesting to see how useful this is. With images still generally 72dpi, they don't scale very well but I'm sure we'll begin seeing a trend to using higher resolution images on web pages in the near future.

And many more

Smart address field, smart search field, phishing and malware protection. 150 features in total—apparently.

For me, I'm curious to see how Safari will affect the balance of browser usage—will we see it eat into the Firefox and dreaded IE6 (and 7) userbase. I'm also interested to see how it handles rich text editors like TinyMCE as Safari, to date, has been less than adequate for managing content with WYSIWYG editors in content-management systems.