Apple’s Safari 4 Beta Is Blindingly Fast!

If you do not live under a rock then surely you know that earlier this week Apple surprised the world and released an early beta of Safari 4, packing a major interface change, speed enhancements and a few other nifty features. Rather than report on the actual release of the browser itself, I thought it would be more beneficial to use Safari 4 for a couple days and write-up my thoughts on such usage. So without further ado, here is what the miso soup lovers found over the course of the past few days.

The most noticeable feature of Safari 4 is not the new location of the tabs but the speed of the browser. I do not necessarily consider myself a browser aficionado, but I have toyed around with just about every browser iteration around just for the sake of playing. While the nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 are pretty darn quick, Safari 4 just blows the lid off any available today.

It is pleasantly surprising to be able to have pages render at such blazing speeds – and not just any page like CNN, but pages riddled with JavaScript like Google Reader and Flickr. I had always hoped to see improvements made around the JavaScript engine arena, mainly because of the proliferation of AJAX-based web sites. Nitro, the Safari 4 engine, is tremendously fast, and is probably more than you could ask for right now.

The new location of the tabs is without a doubt the most controversial new feature of Safari 4. Everywhere you look, everyone is talking about the tabs and how they either love or completely despise the new location. All I will say about the new location is this – I am ambivalent. I neither like nor dislike the location. While the extra vertical space gained as a result of removing the old tab bar is nice, I can see utility in either positioning.

My only real beef with the tabs as they are designed now is they now obfuscate the title of the page if you browse with 10-15 tabs open at any given time. Whereas with the previous tab navigation, the page title was added to Safari’s titlebar, now the title is shortened every time you add a new tab. I would really like the ability to see the full page title somewhere, somehow. In the grand scheme of things, the new tabs and their [lack of] functionality is not a deal killer for me.

What is a deal killer for me is Apple’s decision to not include session saving for the open tabs. Every other major browser on the planet offers this simple feature, whereby if you have 10 tabs open when you decide to shutdown the browser that session is saved, so when you restart the browser those tabs reload automatically. Safari 4 does not include such functionality and I find that to be a huge oversight, especially since most Mac consumers are laptop users.

I do have a few other smaller complaints about the beta.

• Open links in new tabs. When you encounter a link that attempt to open a new window, and you have Safari 4 configured to open a new tab instead, I find that windows are still being opened. In some cases, tabs do open but they do not do so in the background. I prefer to be able to open links in the background and not be interrupted by my browser while reading.
• Save password dialog is still modal. If you login to a web site, Safari will ask if you want to save the password – that dialog box takes over the entire browser until you make the decision to save or not save the password. I would prefer to see a system similar to Firefox 3, which merely adds the save “dialog” as a bar across the top of the page, still allowing you to continue to do what you desire without being interrupted by a modal dialog.
• Third-Party Themes on Windows XP do not work with the Windows version of Safari 4. If you are using a theme other than Luna or the legacy Windows 2000-like theme, you will see your titlebar completely screwed up and not function as expected. Not sure who is at fault here, but my instinct tells me it’s Apple.
• On Windows, Safari 4 still does not do integrated Windows authentication (IWA). This means if you are using a proxy server in a corporate environment, and the proxy relies upon your current Windows domain credentials, Safari 4 will prompt for a user name and password. This is not how it should work – those credentials should be passed automatically as part of IWA.
• Lack of an official plug-in API seems shortsighted. Relying on input manager hacks is not a smart way of adding functionality to the browser, especially when Apple does not officially recognize such methods. Though your “plugin” works today, it may not tomorrow because Apple could release a “security update” with “fixes” that functionality. Without a official API, we will never have a decent delicious bookmarks plugin.
• Middle-Click to close a tab which is in the background is no longer functional. If you are used to being able to close a tab by middle-clicking on in while viewing a different tab then you will have to get used to left-clicking the “close” button on the tab. No big deal but a definite workflow change for those used to middle-clicking.

One feature of the Windows Safari 4 version which I suspect many folks will be happy to see is the ability to use Windows font smoothing rather than the OS X style. I know a large contingent of people who were unhappy with Safari 3 specifically because of the manner in which the browser rendered fonts.

Overall, I really adore the Safari 4 beta. The blazing speed at which pages are rendered is amazing. Unfortunately, Apple still has some work to go before I can consider the browser worth switching to as my primary browser. No matter what, there is no denying that the speed is quite satisfying and that Apple is definitely on the right track.