Safari 4: Eye candy, or seriously useful?

Despite the fact that I use Macs, I've never been a big fan of Safari, Apple's browser. It doesn't always properly view some of the Web pages I use regularly, and it has what I consider odd interface quirks.

For example, if you prefer not to see underlined links, there's no checkbox for that option in its preferences - instead, you have to find and edit an arcane configuration file.

Over the last few years, Apple has been putting considerable effort into advancing Safari, and that's one of the reasons for the renewed browser development landscape. Competition between Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's new Chrome and Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer has been good for Web users because it's resulted in seriously useful innovations.

Apple fired its latest salvo on Tuesday with the surprise release of a public beta of Safari 4, which is available for both Windows and Macintosh systems. It includes some interesting features that are worth exploring, but whether you'll consider them eye candy or innovation is likely to be a matter of personal preference.

At the moment, I lean more toward the former. Safari 4's biggest change borrows from the Cover Flow display style that first appeared in iTunes and then later found a home in the Finder in Mac OS X 10.5. It previews Web pages via thumbnails set against a black backdrop in two separate features.

Whether this is useful or merely looks cool will depend on how you use a Web browser.

The first time you see the effect, it's in a feature called Top Sites, which shows your most-visited sites via a series of stacked thumbnails.

A similar feature is found in Chrome, Google's Windows-only (for now) browser, but it doesn't look half as cool. At first, most of the sites shown are placeholders that are commonly used by many people. Over time, as you use Safari, the thumbnails will change to reflect where you go on the Web.

The Top Sites page appears by default when you open a new blank tab. You can also access it via a button in the bookmark/history manager.

And that's where you next see the Cover Flow feature in Safari 4. Here, it looks even more like Cover Flow in iTunes or the Mac's Finder, with bookmarks and pages you've visited marching across the "stage" with a flick of your mouse cursor.

The Cover Flow display is available in both the Mac and Windows versions, with one exception: If your Windows PC's video card doesn't support Microsoft's DirectX 9 graphics system, you won't see this.

If you're visually inclined, searching through bookmarks and history in this way may make sense to you. I'm more likely to browse through a text list sorted by recent visits or alphabetically - I find I don't use Cover Flow that much, either in iTunes or the Finder. I'm probably not apt to use it much in Safari, either.

There's one other interface tweak worth noting. In both the Windows and Mac versions, Apple has moved the tab bar to the very top of the browser window, another feature borrowed from Chrome.

I don't care much for this layout in Chrome, and still don't like it in Safari. I prefer my tabs to be atop the browser's display pane, where the action is. Fortunately, there are hidden settings you can tweak in Safari to put the tabs back where they belong.

Safari 4 is also noticeably faster to load pages, particularly those that use Javascript, than its predecessor. Although I've not run any benchmarks, those who have say its quantifiably faster than even Firefox 3, and certainly faster than Internet Explorer - which is not hard to do.

I'm a big fan of really useful search built into a browser - which is one reason why I love Firefox 3's "awesome bar" - and Safari has added a feature first seen in Opera that I really like. When you search your recent browsing history, it not only searches URLs and page titles, but also the text recently found on the pages in your browser's cache. This means if you can remember a line of text on a page, you can find it again even if you don't know the site name or page title.

I'm going to try living with Safari 4 for a while and see if it grows on me. I'll report back either here or in a future Computing column.

And if you've got some first impressions of Safari 4, either on a Windows or Mac system, please leave 'em in the comments.

Original here