Early thoughts on Safari 4

Tuesday 24th February

A very early analysis of Safari 4 (it is, after all, only a beta).

I’ll write up a bit more about Safari 4 in coming days, but I just wanted to be quick off the mark and record some very early impressions.

I’ve already found the first CSS bug after just a couple of minutes browsing; shame, because the initial UI experience is pretty positive …
… apart from the window chrome. They’ve attempted to go all ‘native’ (on the XP machine I'm using) but it just looks nasty compared with Safari 3.
I still find the lack of menus disconcerting, both in Safari 4 and Chrome. OK, I get that it’s an apple thing, so I’ll let that pass.
Full-page zoom by default, but a ‘Zoom Text Only’ option a’la Firefox.
The more I think about it, the more the tabbed title bar seems like an act of genius. Just hoping I don’t spot a downside.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can customise your ‘new tab’ page which contains ‘Top Sites’ with rendered previews. Nice. But it seems a little tricky to actually add new sites — I guess they have to be bookmarked.
Ah, I can show the main menu and adding a bookmark adds that page to the ‘Top Sites’ page — much better!
The native RSS viewer, at first glance, appears to be the best of any browser I’ve used.
My user-agent string, for the real obsessives, is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16”

That’ll do as a brief round-up; more soon — especially if I can install it at work.

Comments

Wonderful information. Thank you for sharing.