Crossing my fingers here, as I just installed the public BETA of Apple’s Safari 4. I installed it yesterday on Christina’s Windows laptop, but that’s not a production box like my Mac here. I figure I’ll have to uninstall the BETA and go back to Safari 3 soon enough, but I couldn’t stand not being able to play with it for at least a little bit on my own system. I made sure to update Glims first, and I’m just having to hope that SafariStand, SpeedDownload, GearsEnabler and ClickToFlash continue to work. So far all seems to be fine.
The crowded bunch of tabs at the top (cuz I have a very bad habit of having too many tabs open) is something I’ll have to get used to but at least I know that if I can’t get used to it there is a way to change Safari 4’s tab handling back to the way Safari 3 does it. While I’m mentioning that, there’s also a bunch of other changes one can makes to Safari 4… some are Mac only though.
Initially, I have to say that I really like it. It does indeed seem to be faster— not simply a placebo effect. I like the top sites page that comes up in a new tabs. I like the way the new History Search works… so far, it’s all rather nice. No crashing (so far) either. Obviously Apple took some notes from Google’s Chrome, which is all fine with me. Google stated from the start that the Chromium source was out and freely about for a reason.
How long will I keep it installed? I can’t keep it for long, even if I love it, as it renders differently than Safari 3 (even if improvedly (?) so) and I don’t have another Mac to do webdev from. Can’t wait for the final release though. Can’t wait for a Mac Pro refresh either, while I’m at it. It’’s well past time I upgraded to an Intel Mac. Apple? ahem
And the UPDATES are pouring in… SpeedDownload now updated for Safari 4. Weeeeeee!
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