Safari 4 Public Beta

There’s a new Browser in town, Safari 4 Beta. I read over the features and was excited by what I saw. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you’ll get when you download it.

• Top Sites – Look at your top sites in a snazzy grid view and click on any one to visit that site.
• Cover Flow — Browse through your history and bookmarks like you would in iTunes or Finder
• Full History Search — Type in your keywords and get results in Cover Flow style
• Nitro Engine — Javascript is said to start 30x faster than IE7 and 3x faster than Firefox.
• Tabs On Top — Tabs now don’t take up your favourite’s space because they’re now right at the top of the window
• Windows Native Look and Feel — Windows users will find that their copy of Safari 4 beta looks and feels like any other Windows app, including Windows fonts; however with the same engine as the Mac version.
• Cosmetic changes — You’ll notice everything looking a little brighter and lighter. Bright is good.

I like the top sites idea and it’s executed well except I wish I could manually choose the sites by typing and saving a URL. Also, I’m still not convinced with the look of the new Tabs position on Safari’s window. They’re so far away and I definitely need to get used to that. One last thing I miss is the progress bar that fills while the webpage loads. It’s been replaced with a spinning animation with no feedback as to how much the page has loaded. It’s not really helpful because you can’t tell if a page hangs the moment it happens, you have to wait until your patience runs out while loading to hit CMD+R.

Anyway, I’ll give it a couple of days and of course, it’s still beta so hopefully some things change. Now, go get it!