Safari 4 Beta
 

This is probably the best browser I've had the pleasure of using for a long while. Firefox 3 is horrible under OS X, and Chrome isn't available yet, so although they've got a chance to change my mind somewhere down the line, this is my obsession for the time being.


LIST OF COOL NEW SHIT:

- The UI's been overhauled - tabs are now in the title bar, similar to Chrome's layout under Windows.
- Coverflow-enabled history browsing
- An oh-so-shiny "top sites" page no doubt inspired by those found in Opera and Chrome.
- Search term suggestions in the Google search box.
- It's fast.
- A load of other new shit I've failed to mention.

From what I hear the UI's nicer under XP/Vista, too, although I've yet to try it in Windows myself. The only qualm I have with it is that they still haven't added tab-closing with centre click, but once the plugin I was using for that gets updated for this version of Safari, all will be fine.

This is indeed quite nice, and a step up from FF3. I'm loving the top sites thing... Useful and elegant, as I've come to expect from Apple.

Yeah, this browser is actually something worth watching out for. I downloaded it and love how it integrates into windows so well. Safari 3 sucked as it kept that brushed steel skin even on Windows, and that just looked tacky. I like this though. The cover flow bookmarks and the Top Sites page really did this in for me though. I'm going to use this one for a while!

-In Firefox you can scroll through tabs with Option + Command + L/R arrow key. Is that possible in Safari?
-Can you reopen closed tabs with the keyboard (currently Shift + Tab + T in Firefox)?

Ouch, yeah, definitely going to wait for that!

I'm using it right now and, even though it looks pretty fuckin' sweet, there's certain things I don't like about it so far:

• Even though I have the option selected in the Preference, it still won't open links as tabs in the current window. Instead it opens new windows and shit starts to get real cluttered.
  
• Some of the BB code options don't work properly. Like the text editor here in GFF has the WYSIWYG option disabled and I have to run through the code to make sure everything is peachy before I post it
  
• It has horrible lag times on Flash websites. The pages will still load as fast as your connection can feed them but Flash plays SOOOO SLOOOOOOW. This is especially apparent on sites like Hulu, YouTube.
  
• I don't like the way the tabs are implemented. I'm utterly used to clicking anywhere on a tab to make it active but now I have to click on that tiny portion at the top right of the tab to bring it to the front it's kind of throwing me off, especially when I'm used to quickly scanning tabs on the current window and blindly clicking in its general area to make it active. I'll often find myself clicking at the page name a couple of times and minimizing the whole tab into the dock.
  
• Our company website now loads with broken frames so I actually have to bookmark the pages on the site I visit to upload and organize our school photos.
  
• The coverflow of bookmarked sites takes some getting used to

Few trinkets here and there make it pretty nice overall but it still lacks an options to clear personal data on quit like Firefox does, something that I use like clockwork my kids regularly use this computer too. I normally wouldn't mind, but I don't want them going through my history and them asking me shit like, "Mr. V! What's 4chan?"

STAY AWAY! STAY. THE FUCK. AWAY!

If this doesn't have the auto-URL recommendation thing that Firefox has, I'm not biting on this. It helps a bunch that I could just type in whatever was part of the title on the page, and it would immediately bring up the pages that I've visited up in a convenient list of URLs containing whatever word I had just typed into the address bar.

Seems to work as intended for me...

This is likely to do how WYSIWYG is implemented. It seems that unless your user agent is that of Firefox, the feature isn't even available. Probably relying on Firefox-specific DOM features to implement.

I haven't experienced any lag or slowness related to Flash; not on Hulu, Gametrailers.com, or YouTube. Are you running the latest version of the plugin?

That's the first I've heard of this. The entire tab area should be a hot-spot for receiving clicks. In fact, the strongest complaint that I've heard regarding the new tabbed interface is that click-throughs on inactive tabs while the window is in the background bring the tab to the forward rather than just the whole window.

I can explain this one for you. Someone doesn't know how to use stylesheets. They included HTML markup in the linked-to CSS file, which brought extra HEAD and BODY tags into the page.

Yeah, its flashy. TBH, I'd like to see a cover-flow style or top-sites style display for opening entire folders in my bookmarks bar, rather than opening them out into separate tabs. Or maybe display all open tabs into a exposé/coverflow/top-sites presentation for quick visual scanning.

I've noticed that the "Save As Web Application..." feature has disappeared from this build of Safari 4. I wonder what the fate of that feature is...

Yeah I am. I don't know what's causing it for me. Speaking of lag, I've noticed a lot of animated GIF images also run at a fraction of their speed on Safari; case in point: Pangalin's current avatar. Maybe the slower speed is the way they're supposed to run, who knows?

Yeah, I know that the whole tab should be a hot-spot for clicks but it seems that the only thing that activates the tab for me is the "handle" on its top right. The tabs ARE clickable but that usually serves as the equivalent of clicking on the title bar of any window and allows me to move it or minimize it by double-clicking it; something I accidentally do very often while trying to activate tabs.

I didn't design the page so I'm sure it's a botch job anyway. I just liked it better when I could browse to the site on Firefox and not have that problem.

Safari's always been this way :( Although, I've been running 3, 4 and Firefox side-by-side, and though gif speed still isn't quite right, it's now just slightly slower than in Firefox (albeit still noticeably slow).

I know.

And the answer is "no".