Safari 4 Public Beta

Yesterday Apple released the public beta for Safari 4 (Mac + PC). There come some interesting new features which should draw a new crowd users to the popular web browser.

Tabs on top:

Taking a seriously large leaf out of Google Chrome's book, the tabs in Safari now appear in the titlebar of the window(s). I personally quite like this interface - the tabs are out of the way, using up unnecessary space. They also slide nice and smooth and can be broken off to form new windows, or added to other ones.

As you can see, now Safari on windows runs with the natural windows borders, making it feel more like an individual program, not just a port from Mac OSX.

Cover flow:

Now you can browse your history/bookmarks in the iTunes/Mac Cover Flow style, as is saves snapshots of all recent windows.

Top Sites:

In another nod to Google Chrome, and also IE7/8, now when you open a new tab you get a fancy 'Top Sites' display.

Speed:

Apple tells us that Safari 4 is up to 30x faster than IE7. That's pretty darn fast.

Safari is now my browser of choice. In the past I used Mozilla Firefox, but then ditched it for Chrome in favor of the whole tab interface and general smoothness (tab sliding and the loading indicators). Also, it started up DAMN fast. Safari has yet to live up to my speed needs from Chrome, but hopefully this will improve, as this is only a beta.