While many of even the most stalwart Apple fans have abandoned Safari in favor of the all-popular Firefox, Apple hasn’t given up on redemption just yet. On Tuesday, the company released a beta of Safari 4, which rolls a number of improvements – including a much-needed boost in speed – into the browser.
Among the boldest claims for Safari, Apple says the new Nitro JavaScript engine it runs can 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and three times faster than Firefox 3. That speed also carries over to regular HTML pages, which Apple says it will load three times faster than either browser.
Besides the advertised increases in speed, Apple has also thickened the feature list for Safari to compete with the likes of Firefox and Google Chrome. For instance, it borrows Opera’s thumbnailed array of most-visited sites with a feature called Top Sites. And like Chrome, it offers a more powerful search bar (which offers suggestions from Google as you type) with a feature called Smart Search Field. Tabs on Top even pushes tabs into the title bar to save room, another feature borrowed from Chrome.
Apple will bring some unique features to the table, though, such as Cover-Flow style browsing for history and bookmarks, and a single search form to scour the titles, addresses and text of previously visited Web pages.
The Safari 4 beta is available immediately as a free download from Apple.
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