Safari 4: The fastest browser in the world!

The fastest browser in the world?
There is no need to keep you in suspense as we can say that Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with its new look and engine code named “Nitro”, certainly lives up to expectations. If you visit the Apple website you will see that they are advertising it as the “fastest web browser in the world”, and you can certainly witness this yourself by referring to out Acid2 compatibility tests and the performance of SunSpider JavaScript. Will the third placed browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox be able to take additional market share?

150 functions!
While some web editors are currently lacking inspiration, it doesn’t appear to be the case at Apple, as there have been at least 150 different functions announced. We won’t list them all out here, but if you want a summery then it can be found here. Among the new features, we can point out that a number of them are already present in competing browsers either as a standard or via the installation of extensions (full page zoom, keyboard browsing, private browsing, intelligent searching in the address field, display of your top visited sites, etc). At the same time, as you will see, there are fortunately some real innovations (Cover Flow, different tab arrangements, tools to manage databases offline, progress indications integrated into the address bar, Native Windows aspect…).

Goodbye Safari 3 and hello Safari 4
You simply have to enter “Safari” or “Safari 3” in any search engine. You will see links about Safari version 3… which can still be downloaded from here. For the moment, it is the final version 4.0 which is available from the Apple website: 4.30.17.0.


Minimum Requirements
Under Windows, there are no surprises as you will need either Windows XP or Vista, a Pentium 500 MHz processor or better and 256 MB of RAM. To take advantage of the Top Sites and Cover Flow functions, you will need a video card that is DirectX 9.0 (64 MB of RAM) compatible. Under Mac, OS X Leopard 10.5.6 with Security Update 2009-001 installed, or OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and 256MB of memory as a minimum will be required.