Safari 4 is finally out of Beta so I thought I’d take it for a spin (I never did convince myself to try the Beta and fiddle with webkit frameworks to keep Safari 3 at the same time..). A fresh install of Safari 4 on Tiger looks like this:
First look, seems they’ve ditched the tabs-on-top idea (woo!) although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a hidden enable option in there (apparently there was the option to switch them off in the beta). Gone is the old metal look in favour of the grey plastic style found in iTunes and other Apple apps (Although I believe Safari 3 was like this under Leopard already??). Despite the modern stylings, I have to say though that the interface now seems quite dull (not that it had much colour before mind). I personally don’t like that the close button on tabs only appears when you mouse near, and even that’s in grey.
Some other changes as far as I can tell, but first a screenie of Safari 3 on Tiger that I managed to dig up:
Firstly, in Safari 4 the reload button takes the place of the snapback button (not shown in the above screenie) which was at the right end of the address field:
I didn’t really use snapback, but I did use the reload button which was on the left, Now it seems the only option is to use the one here since it’s not in the customise toolbar sets (of course ?R does the same thing). Another small gripe, the add bookmark button seems to have shimmied over to right beside the address field. As far as I can remember, the original was a separate button and I may have swapped it round with the Home button, whereas it’s part of the address bar in Safari 4 and a bit too close for my liking.
Safari 3 had a blue loading bar that appeared behind the text in the address bar, in Safari 4 this has also slid to the right and has become a darker blue. Also, while loading there is the option to click the stop icon, doing away with the need for a separate Stop button altogether.
One final thing before you become truly bored with Safari 4′s interface (it’s not really THAT different), when the Safari window is in the background, the title bar becomes pale and the window controls lose their colour (in other apps, only the buttons change colour). A minor change but good visual feedback.
On to actually using Safari 4 then. On the surface it really doesn’t behave much differently from Safari 3 tbh, which is both a good thing and little bit disappointing (I like being surprised). Apple boasts 150 features on their site (not 150 *new* features mind) so i’ll leave it to you to go a Googling. One of the most talked about though was the introduction of Top Sites and so this was my first stop.
Top sites, as the name implies, keeps a record of your most frequently visited websites and displays them to you as a nice curved wall of previews. You can enter Edit mode and ‘pin’ the ones you want to keep, drag them around, or remove the ones you don’t want. A nice touch is the little star icon on sites that have changed so you know which ones to visit. You can have 24, 12, or 6 previews on display and you can also drag links into the window to add them.
It had me enraptured for the first five minutes anyway (It brought back memories of CubicEye – completely different mind! – anyone used that?), then I realised something. Top Sites, while oh so pleasing on the eyes, isn’t anymore useful than what we had before. For starters, if I pin the sites I use the most (Blogs, news sites etc) i’d effectively just be pinning the links that are already in my bookmarks bar. Okay so I get to see them all on one page, but it’s still a click away (The little icon of squares opens Top Sites) which is no more than clicking a drop down of links. Also, while Top Sites does show if a page has been updated, most of the updates i’m interested in are returned by RSS feeds which is already comfortably handled by the bookmarks bar and other RSS readers. I probably will use Top Sites, if only for the visual gloss, and possibly there’s a way to set Top Sites as the home page, but in the long run that might grate. In any case, it’s a nice optional extra.
Another cool feature is the introduction of Coverflow in the history and bookmarks browsers. If you’ve ever used iTunes, you know what Coverflow is. If not, it’s basically a scrollable library of previews that you can flip through to find what you want. In the case of iTunes that’s songs and albums, for Safari it’s websites. It’s really nice and I can see being able to browse your entire history this way being immensely efficient:
I’ve noticed one small issue though: If you have your bookmarks set up with folders as I have, these won’t display as it only shows websites. This is more of a personal problem mind, since I have so many folders within folders (hence the previous post) and I’ve never made use of Collections (Should I?). So I think a reorganisation of my bookmarks is inevitable before I can use Coverflow fully.
Another welcome addition is the Developer tools (I honestly can’t say what Safari 3 had since I used Firefox for all my testing) and, while the Safari 4 Developer tools don’t at first glance appear to have the ability to make changes like you can in Firebug (or at least not as easily, **UPDATE** My bad, how could I miss this? It works just like Firebug.. [also] there’s something called the Snippet Editor but I haven’t tried it yet), there are nice touches like the Resources section in the Web Inspector which shows you the download time and size of a sites files. These are definitely options I need to explore in more detail so I defer to the conclusions of the real web developers out there.
Rather than a comprehensive review, since I’m sure there are plenty out there, this has just been my initial reactions to Safari 4. Overall i’m happy with the new version: it’s not so different as to turn me away, but it has enough sparkle to keep me playing with it. Together with Firefox, Safari on the Mac is still my browser of choice (Everything i’ve heard about Safari 3 on Windows has me in no hurry to try it – Firefox all the way – but maybe Safari 4 will be better?).
I’ve got a few more posts in the pipline: another movie review (maybe), some games reviews, as well as some projects i’m just getting started with (hopefully), so feel free to wait with baited breath;-) Oh, in other news, i’ve accepted an offer from my dad to go home to Scotland to work for the summer. I’ll still be online, but things might
be a bit quiet in the coming week.
Cheers.
