Apple outs Safari 4 Beta

Robert Hallock 24 Feb, 2009 at 11:06am ET Article published in Tech

Apple has posted a public beta of the newest version of the Safari browser. Just what everyone needs on a sunny Tuesday morning, a clip from their PR:

Apple today announced Safari 4 public beta for Mac and Windows. With its new Nitro engine, Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3. And it features many innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable, including Top Sites, Full History Search, Cover Flow, Tabs on Top, and still others. Safari 4 beta is available for immediate download for the Mac and PC.

Comments

24 Feb 2009 ~ 11:46am Linc The download page is broken in Firefox, IE8, and Chrome. I guess only Safari and Opera users are allowed to have it.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 12:23pm BuddyJ Works for me in FF3. YOUR DOING IT RONG
24 Feb 2009 ~ 12:57pm Thrax Worked for me when I posted the news article as well.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 1:31pm kryyst Yep worked for me and the browser is working for me right now.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 1:40pm kryyst I'll also add. Looks sweet supposed to be faster, but I'm not noticing it. However also seems to be a bit of a memory pig. My FF3 with plugins is around 50mb, Safari is averaging 90mb. Safari also seems to be using CPU cycles when I'm just sitting on a page not doing anything where as FF isn't.

I should also note I'm talking about Safari on Windows, not mac.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 2:45pm mondi

kryyst wrote:

I'll also add. Looks sweet supposed to be faster, but I'm not noticing it. However also seems to be a bit of a memory pig. My FF3 with plugins is around 50mb, Safari is averaging 90mb. Safari also seems to be using CPU cycles when I'm just sitting on a page not doing anything where as FF isn't.

I should also note I'm talking about Safari on Windows, not mac.

I'm seeing about the same memory footprint with OSX.

I sampled the Safari process, and it looks like the CPU cycles when idling are related to Flash (Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity and various timers) and the garbage collector, which seems to be running pretty aggressively. If I browse to a plain page without flash - the CPU usage drops to zero pretty quickly.

These tabs are going to take some getting used to.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 3:32pm Linc It works now. As of this morning, it did not. It was collaborated by several other web developers on Twitter.
24 Feb 2009 ~ 11:05pm Sonorous I hate the tabs at the top instead of under the address bar. I didn't look really far to see if it could be set to the older tab system, but after a peek in the prefs I saw no option. Uninstalled.
25 Feb 2009 ~ 12:43am Snarkasm http://www.macworld.com/article/139004/safari4_tabbar.html
25 Feb 2009 ~ 8:46am kryyst That tab fix only works for OS X. Which is another issue with Safari for Windows. None of the tweaks and pluggins for Safari work in the windows version so it's like getting half a browser. In OS X Safari is looking sweet and the ability to now sync up my bookmarks between firefox and Safari means Safari is again usefull to me on my mac. But for windows Safari is still pretty much a tech demo when compared to FF.
26 Feb 2009 ~ 12:40am Dinesh works fine with windows 7 build 7000.