Safari 4 – Review at First Glance

Well, I hope you all have read my previous article on Safari 4 because that would be of great help to you while you go through this one.

Firstly, when you launch the Safari 4 from desktop, first thing you note is the speed with which this program launches and it’s quite impressive too. On my VAIO, Safari 4 launches at an average 1.8 seconds. As, First Impression is the Last Impression, Safari 4 starts marking it’s existence as World’s Fastest Web Browser from the very beginning.

When you launch it, by default, you would see a page displaying ‘Top Sites’ in a wonderful way.

In the bottom left corner, you will observe a small button styled in apple way, captioned as ‘Edit’ That actually edits the list of top sites list. When you click on it, you will get something like this on every tile of site.

On the top left corner of every tile lies two buttons, one for cancelling a website from being displayed on the top sites page and one for pinning the site on the top sites page so that you can view them later on. As you surf the web, the list of websites recently and frequently visited by you gets updated dynamically. When you click on a tile from Top Sites, you get a smooth animation expanding the website on your page. Also, from edit option, you can set tile size and depending on that, Apple sets the number of tiles displayed on the page.

This time Apple has worked pretty hard for making Safari nice to use. You can see imitation of Google Chrome style interface because as in Google Chrome, you have tabs mounted on the title bar. With Google chrome, it also imitates the Internet Explorer by merging all menus into just two menus. From the settings menu, you can enable or disable menu bar at any time.

From surfing point of view, Safari 4 makes video streaming an amazing experience. You can view videos clearly on web page. Also, the power of surfing safari provides is widened by addition of ‘Silverlight 2’ in the plug-in. Now, from windows, you can get view of Clear view of Silverlight from safari which makes it more pleasant to see.

Another new thing Apple introduces us is the Cover flo in ‘History’ folder. Now, you can browse your history by not only seeing the names of your sites but also by actually seeing them. Apple has not released the retail version of this software but we do have the beta version. In this version sometimes we faced an issue regarding stability while viewing the history in cover flo. We hope retail version of Safari 4 has got this problem resolved. Take a look at the newly designed History Folder:

There’s a history behind this history folder. Apple first introduced it’s cover flo concept in it’s iPods and since then it has been using it. I can also see cover flo being used in Apple Mac OS X Leopard too. Here, you are not only dependant on the cover flo but you can also view your pages from the list below. But remember, as you change the selection the cover flo selection will also change.

There are many things in safari 4 which are also quite useful like ‘Private Browsing’. By private browsing, you can browse internet privately. Frankly speaking, when you have private browsing mode on, whatever site you visit, will not be recorded in the history folder. Cookies will be accepted but will be deleted as soon as you close the private browsing mode.

Another wonderful thing with Safari 4 is, that was available in Safari 3 too, and that is Snap Back. It is very useful tool that helps you return to search results. Suppose you are searching something using some search engine and you come up with search results. You click on one of the results and you go on navigating that using the same tab. Then, to go back, you will have to go back plenty of times. Instead, you will have a snap back icon besides the search box. As soon as you click that, your recent search list from where you started will be displayed.

So, that’s all about safari 4 beta and if you want more, you may visit Apple website.