As part of the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that Safari 4 has gone gold and been released for OS X 10.4 (Tiger), OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows XP, and Windows Vista. Presumably it will work fine in Windows 7 as well.
Courtesy of Apple
Safari 4 has over 150 new features. While Apple tends to highlight the eye candy, there are plenty of changes in the Safari browser to make it a must-have update for most users.
- Top Sites. Provides an at-a-glance preview of up to 24 web sites. Actually, it’s more than a preview; you see the actual, live web site. Changes to the site are updated dynamically in real time.
- Cover Flow. Cover Flow is everywhere; now it’s part of the Safari browser experience as well. The best use of Cover Flow is for backtracking through your browsing history. Cover Flow makes it easy to see where you’ve been, and find that site you meant, but forgot, to bookmark.
- Nitro Engine. Apple claims the Nitro engine that powers Safari works at such a blazing fast speed that it outperforms all other browsers in the iBench and SunSpider benchmarks.
I haven’t been able to confirm that yet with my own tests, but Safari 4 is indeed fast on both Mac and PCs. I think it’s safe to say that Safari 4 is the fastest Mac browser, but there are so many Windows browsers it will take a great deal of time to confirm that boast on both platforms.
My favorite new capability is the built-in phishing, malware, and antivirus protection. Safari will identify web sites that are fraudulent or that are known hosts of malware. Additionally, Safari will notify your antivirus software (if present) whenever you download a file. This allows the antivirus software to scan the file in real time, ensuring you are downloading malware- and virus-free data.
Safari 4 is available for downloading from the Apple web site. I highly recommend Safari 4 beta users and Safari 3 users update as soon as possible, since the release version of Safari 4 is current with all known security patches already applied.
Re Safari 4.0: I downloaded it yesterday and while it is impressive, I was disappointed to find that cookie management is apparently not improved. One of the reasons I like FireFox is because I can select the option of automatically deleting all cookies when I close the browser.
If there is a way to do this with Safari 4, I would sure like to know….
Hi Bob,
I haven’t used it myself, but Safari 4 does include the option for “Private Browsing.” From the Safari 4 help system:
“When private browsing is on, webpages are not added to the history list, the Downloads window is cleared, information isn’t saved for AutoFill, and searches are not added to the pop-up menu in the search field. Any websites that store databases on your computer can’t modify the databases, so services normally available at such sites may be partially or completely unavailable until you turn off private browsing.
Any changes made to cookies during private browsing are discarded when when you turn off private browsing.
IMPORTANT:Private browsing only removes the names of items you’ve downloaded from the Downloads window. To get rid of the items themselves, you must delete them.”
Private Browsing is available under the Safari menu. One note, though: As far as I can tell, whenever you launch Safari it returns to the default non-private browsing mode. So you will need to get in the habit of enabling the Private Browsing option each time you use Safari.
I’m sure it’s possible to permanently enable Private Browsing via one of Safari’s preferences, but I haven’t had a chance yet to investigate it.
Tom