February 24th, 2009
Apple releases Safari 4 beta (Updated with Acid3 results)
Apple today announced a public beta of Safari 4 which it is calling “the world’s fastest & most innovative browser.” The 31.7 MB download has the following new features:
- The Nitro engine – runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3
- Top Sites – a visual preview of frequently visited pages
- Full History Search – to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages
- Cover Flow – to easily flip through web history or bookmarks
- Tabs on Top – to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive
Have you downloaded it yet? What’s your favorite feature?
Update: The new Safari 4 public beta released today scores 100/100 on the Acid 3 test.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. (Wikipedia)
This is an improvement over Safari 3.2.1 (5523.15) which scored worse – 75/100. By comparison, Firefox 3.0.6 on the Mac scores an abysmal 56 (on mine) to 71/100. The WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Epiphany, Arora) are the only ones to pass the test. More results can be found in the Wikipedia entry for Acid 3.
Update 2: If you’re only getting 98 or 99 out of 100 with Safari b4 (as I was) clear out your caches and you should be able to get a perfect score.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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