I downloaded and installed Safari 4 Beta and ran it on my Vista-installed laptop.
Performance and Functionality
It takes a bit of time to load up, but seems to run faster than the previous version of Safari. Some bits of Javascript functionality on sites failed to work when I had too much tabs open. I like that the tabs are similar to Mac’s menu that’s flushed at the top, but I don’t like how the tabs are so thin and quite unreadable – hard to tell them apart. When I had too many tabs open the were hard to scroll to. I got used to firefox’s mousewheel navigation when I had too many tabs open on a window.
For some odd reason, when I start Safari up, the window isn’t maximized – which is kind of annoying, but I can live with that.
Favourite/Top sites
If you love Apple, you’ll probably love this. Whenever you open a new tab, it displays a grid of your favourite sites (like the image at the top). It was nice eye candy to start with, but later I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. And I realized I don’t have to do anything – it kind of ‘remembers’ which sites I’ve been to. I’m not sure if I’m ready for Safari but I guess if I were to use it on a regular basis, it might be useful to have this feature.
I want X feature
I’m still not convinced it’s blazingly fast, so my bet’s still on Firefox. It would be nice to see some hotkey commands, that are straight-up easy to use (key help displayed in menus or what not).
Has a lot of potential.