Apple Releases Safari 4 Beta

Two summers ago, Apple at their WWDC conference announced that their Safari browser would be released for the Windows platform, alongside their OS X offering. This was rather significant news, but thanks to some issues that plagued the original release, the browser didn’t remain in the limelight for too long. That changed a bit last spring when the company followed-up with their 3.1 release, but even then, Safari has had a rough time making real headway with the likes of Mozilla Firefox and IE dominating the market.

Apple hopes that this fact will change sooner than later, and to help coax more people to try out their browser, they’ve today unveiled a beta version of 4.0, a high-tech offering that is the first to pass the gruelling Acid3 test (I verified, it does indeed score 100/100). According to Apple, it also renders Javascript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3, and 3 times faster than Firefox 3… bold claims, and claims I’m sure some will be investigated soon.

Improvements as such are nice, but there’s a lot new on the UI front as well. The browser sports a brand-new interface that reminds me nothing of the previous version, and I have to say, it looks quite nice. It’s not as minimal as Google Chrome, but it’s close. Despite the clean look though, there’s a lot of eye-candy, including smooth transitions and even a replica “flipper” feature that allows you to flip through recent sites and searches.

There’s too much new to mention here, but if you are curious about trying out a new browser, or want to upgrade from Safari 3, then the beta sure seems stable enough to begin using for full-time purposes. I could be wrong though, and there’s always a risk you take with betas. But given Apple is actually making this the default download for Safari, even they must find it stable enough.

Apple is leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 for an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks.