Apple today released the Safari 4.0 Beta, sporting some new features including Coverflow, new developer tools, and a fast new rendering engine. The overall design has also been slightly altered, as have the general operation of the program.

Installation - Installation took just under 5 minutes and used up 107MB coming from the most recent non-beta version of Safari on a Mac. Installation was required on the primary drive and required that all current security patches be installed. A soft restart was required after installation. All preferences and data from the previous installation of Safari was maintained.

Coverflow - Anyone who has used Leopard or iTunes knows about the file browsing method known as coverflow. It allows you to view files by a preview of that file, instead of just a name or details. Apple has extended this concept to both favorites and history. When opening a new tab, instead of a traditional blank white page, you are greeted with a curved wall featuring a series of windows (6, 12, or 24). These windows can be customized to show either a pre-chosen favorite or an automatically selected often visited site. In the bottom right corner is a search box, which typing into will cause the history coverflow to appear, allowing you to scroll through pages previously visited that contain a given keyword.

Developer Tools - Safari now includes a very useful set of developer tools. It allows the live testing of HTML and CSS code, similar to that provided in FireFox by third party plugins. It also gives a very useful site profiling tool, giving a look at the size and loading time of each page, broken down into various elements and parts. Errors in both HTML and Javascript are also displayed, along with any used resources in loading the page. Tools can either be opened up in a separate window, or on the same page. All in all, it provides largely the same functionality of far more confusing and widely used plug-ins.

Performance - Safari 4.0 boasts a brand new rendering engine, designated as Nitro. Apple boasts a 3x speed increase over both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Observed speed increases were only around 20% faster over Safari 3, around 35-40% faster then Internet Explorer, and only around 15% faster then Safari. Pages rendered largely the same as the previous version of Safari, maintaining the same look and feel. Program startup time is roughly the same, but occupies quite a bit larger RAM footprint, over 55% larger. It should be noted that although there is an increased RAM footprint, the majority of it was due to the operation of the program and not leakage, as was largely observed with Safari 3.

Hidden Features and Tricks - Just incase you didn’t like some of the new things Apple threw in, such as the moving of the tabs or the new autocomplete in the address bar, there are some ways to fix that. Hidden Genius (http://swedishcampground.com/safari-4-hidden-preferences) has a list of steps to get back some of the old functionality of Safari 3.

Missing Features - There are still a few things that Apple missed the boat on. Typing a term into the address bar still causes Safari to attempt to make it into an address, even if it contains spaces or is not a valid address. Contrast this to FireFox which will do a Google search if it the site isn’t one previous visited. Safari also still takes up more RAM then does Photoshop – something which defies laws of physics. Official plug-in support is also still missing, making it hard to add any real functionality to the program.

I have yet to run across any errors which could be credited to the beta status. Overall a worthy upgrade that lives up to the Apple hype, and one which I recommend doing now despite the beta status.