Apple Releases Safari 4
Apple today stripped the beta tag from, and released, Safari 4 into the wild. Safari 4, which has been in beta since February, offers a host of features and enhancements to what Apple claims is the “World’s Fastest Browser.”
Safari 4 features an updated user interface, and numerous under-the-hood enhancements, all of which contribute to a great new browser, built with the user in mind. If you’ve been using Safari 3, this is a fantastic update you’ll definitely want to install immediately. If you’ve been using the Safari 4 beta for the last few months, some changes have been made, and stability has improved. No matter what browser you currently use, Safari 4 is a gorgeous app that puts the content up front and gets out of your way while you surf.
Safari 4 Top Sites
Top Sites
Top Sites is one of the more notable features, where you can view up to 24 of your most visited sites, via a slick 3D wall of page previews, in one window — making it much easier to get to the sites you visit most.
If you prefer to use Top Sites as your start page, which you can do in the General tab in your Safari preferences, you can “pin” specific pages so they’re always available, no matter how often you visit them. You do this simply by hitting the Edit button at the bottom of the Top Sites page and clicking the little pin icon in the corner of each page thumbnail.
Search
Searching in Safari has seen a few feature updates. You can use the new Search bar, which auto-completes terms, offers suggestions, and displays a list of recent searches for you. Pretty standard stuff. But here’s the cool part: Let’s say you want to search for a site you’ve been to in the past, but can’t remember where it was. Simply visit your Top Sites page and use the Search box at the bottom. Safari will search through your history and display thumbnail previews of the search results via Cover Flow in the browser window — making it much easier to find what you’re looking for. The Cover Flow feature also works with your Bookmarks.
Shortcuts
Apple has added a few options to the Customize Toolbar preferences. You can now add buttons for Top Sites, Bookmarks Bar, Site Information, Email Page and more. To make room for these buttons, Apple has removed the Stop/Reload button and made it part of the URL bar, as seen below.
Safari 4 buttons
For those who were using Safari 4 beta and didn’t care for the Tabs-On-Top feature, you’ll feel all warm and fuzzy when you find the Tab bar has been moved back to its Safari 3 location below the toolbar.
While browsers have had the ability to reduce or enlarge text for a long time, Safari 4 goes one step further by allowing you to zoom an entire page in and out, keeping the content and overall look of the site the way it was intended. Of course, you can also zoom the text only, and support for external style sheets is available, so you can choose your fonts, sizes and colors for all web sites.
A few other nifty features of Safari 4 include inline viewing of PDFs without cumbersome plugins, the ability to “clip” a web page to create a Dashboard Widget of the page, the ability to save images directly into your iPhoto library, and mail the contents of a page (in its full HTML glory) with the click of a button.
Safari 4 Under the Hood
The new JavaScript engine (Nitro) in Safari 4, which boasts speeds four times faster than Firefox 3, four-and-a-half times faster than Safari 3, and eight times faster than Internet Explorer 8, was noticeably improved over previous Safari versions — especially when loading JavaScript-heavy pages such as my iGoogle page.
Page rendering speeds have also been improved by up to three times, according to Apple’s statements. Not having any scientific data to back up my claim, I’ll say that it is fast. Very fast. Considering Safari 4 will run as a 64-bit app under Snow Leopard when it’s released in September, Safari with its Nitro JavaScript engine will be speeding along at a pace that will leave other browsers envious.
Safari 4 also boasts support for HTML 5, for the use of offline technologies, and some pretty cool CSS 3 effects such as animations, fonts and media effects. It’s also the only browser I know of that supports ICC color profiles out of the box, so images appear in the browser as they were intended to.
Of particular interest to web site designers and developers is the ability to invoke Safari 4′s Web Inspector to get a closer look at the underpinnings of a web site. You can view the CSS and HTML code, script and database information, as well as beautiful graphs displaying site statistics, such as image size. As you can see in the screenshot below, somebody really needs to optimize the MacBook Pro image!
Safari 4 Web Inspector
Firefox, with its plethora of extensions available, has been my browser of choice for a long time. But Safari does offer one thing that Firefox just can’t seem to catch hold-of in Mac OS X — speed! Safari 4 just blows the doors off even Firefox 3.5 beta. And it does offer some customization capability via InputManagers (not supported by Apple, by the way). Overall, if you can live without dozens of extensions for Firefox, Safari is by far the best browser for the Mac.
Safari 4 is available now as a free download for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later and requires that you install Security Update 2009-002. You can download Safari 4 from Apple’s web site.
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Where did the tabs on top go? i loved that feature.
Any way to re-enable it?
I suppose it might find its way back via some 3rd-party hack, but Apple has moved them back below the toolbar for now.
I wish I liked the changes more, but I have DIALUP which is horrifically slow, and the progress bar was helpful indicating about how much longer I’d have to wait for a page to load. Without that now, all I see is that little circle going round and round “loading”, and it tells me nothing more. Pages seem to load slower with it too, but maybe it’s my imagination! I sure hope the progress bar returns, especially to us poor schmucks who still have dialup!!!!
A grep of strings doesn’t show anything for “TabBar”. This is a mistake, the tabs really belong at the top… now where did I put that beta disk image…
Tabs on Top was great; the old tab bar position seems stupid to me now, and once again the title bar is a humongous waste of space. Apple really blew it on this one. Sissys.
I am sorry to say this but this release is just pure garbage to me. I have nothing but crashes!. It is very random when it crashes, but it is usually when i start Safari up, and when i want to quit Safari. I get the infamous wheel of death, and the annoying message “safari not responding”. Safari might be fast, but this does not mean anything as long as safari keeps crshing so damn much.
Camin0 is still the best for mac period.
Yeah, I LOVED the tabs on top. I’d pin the app to just under the menu bar and I could check for unread mail, etc. very easily.
Honestly, I have no idea why Apple shoved this thing out the door today instead of with Snow Leopard in September. The ONLY reason I can think they did is if there’s some iPhone 3.0 tie in which I doubt.
Sorry to hear you’re having so many problems just hours after its release. I guess I’ve been lucky – I had only a few crashes of the Safari 4 beta, and no crashes of this new release version – and I have 1Password, Glims and Safari 140 installed with it.
Hello James,
I’ve been using Safari for years, and guess I’m one of the few who manages their websites through new windows. I prefer a new window for diff websites vs. tabs.
Apple changed the behavior of the Apple + click.. Now it opens the new page in a tab. If I could disable tabs, maybe it wold open in a new Window?
Do you know how I can get Apple+Click to open new windows with Safari 4?
Thank you for your time,
Gary
As always, if you’re experiencing any instability after a Safari update be sure to disable any Safari extensions that you may have installed. They tend to be a common cause of problems around the time of software updates. They tend to live inside ~/Library/InputManagers/ and /Library/InputManagers/.
I’ve had no crashes with the new Safari so far. It works mostly as advertised. I agree with those people who have gotten used to tabs on top. I also miss it now that they have gone back to their original position :( I wish we could have tabs on top, plus the “blue progress – URL” all-in-one bar back again. Still, overall, I prefer Safari 4 to most of the other browsers out there for routine use. Its speed is definitely a selling point for me.
Just a friendly heads-up: I don’t know if it was meant to be understood like that, but when you say that “while browsers have had the ability to reduce or enlarge text for a long time, Safari 4 goes one step further by allowing you to zoom an entire page in and out”,
you make it sound like a new cool feature has just been introduced, when in fact Apple is just keeping pace with the other big players: IE7, FF3 and Chrome have had this feature from day one.
Mac OS in general allows you to hold down the control key while scrolling your mouse wheel to zoom in on the entire screen, not just inside of the browser itself. As far as I know, this is not a Windows feature. So, it is somewhat pointless for them to even have a zoom feature in their browser, at least for the Mac version.
Oddly, Safari crashed on me right after the upgrade. I have noticed it’s a lot easier to move tabs around now.
I loved the beta version of Safari 4. I made it my default browser after being a devotee of Firefox. Safari 4 beta never crashed on me and I loved the look and the speed. After I downloaded the final release, I was immediately disappointed in the loss of the tabs on top feature. Inside of half a hour the recent release has crashed on me four times. Password1 is not showing up and it does not seem as fast as the beta version did, albeit that is subjective evaluation. I have since replaced Safari 4 with the previous beta version and I will go back to making Firefox my default browser, which is too bad, since I thought that Safari used to have the look and speed. I will now give up the speed for functionality and stability.
Thank GOD, the stupid tabs at the top are gone. They were an usability nightmare, specially if you have a tablet. The new Safari works wonderfully, im hacks and all, and way faster.
1Password has an update. Make sure you check the Application menu in 1Password. You have to have the beta check turned on in the preferences. Full instructions here.
I really miss the top tabs, they were great for usability. I dont know how you can say they were Fabio. Now we have an extra 35 pixels of unusable space. At least on the top they served purpose as functioning title bars as well. Now I see two of the same thing, redundant. aside from that, and have been using the beta, I like this release. I havent had any crashes or issues with it. Beta had some issues with cookies, which are now fixed. Good on ya! But still miss my top tabs. Give us the option apple!
completely agree with others saying about that the tabs on the top were great! I miss them too, title bar wastes space. Now, I dont want to convince everyone, but it’s a pain, that currently there is now option for that.
g
But I still can’t browse apple’s web site with it – it will open the first page I want, then I have to use Firefox to browse through the links. This does seem completely bizarre – I would have thought Apple’s site would have been the one it was optimised for.
Otherwise great – for the record I’m happy with the tabs where they are.
i blame the chorus of whiners from gruber to the geeks on ars technica’s macintoshian achaia forum, the opposition to tabs on top was almost unanimous.
rip tabs on top.
hmmm…. When I’m editing the top sites page it says I can drag the URL of a page I want to add. Only thing is, the URL bar goes blank, and I can’t drag a URL from another tab. Unless I’m missing something, how does one drag a URL to this page from within Safari (without opening another Safari window).
Damnit, put my tabs back on top! I’m not upgrading from my beta version.
I’m neutral about the location about the tabs, but I really miss the location bar progress indicator. I had no luck using the terminal command that worked with the beta. Any ideas?
One more vote for bringing back tabs on top. That was great and I miss that. Should at least be an option.
Another vote for tabs on top. At least give us an option
@Hagen Kaye
The simple answer is, you can’t. You have to open a second window.
(*sigh*) I do miss the Tabs on Top.
Oh well. One thing I wrote about when TOT first came out is that I missed the ability to double-click the tabs bar for a new tab, and how small the area available to drag/move a tab was. Now that things are back to the old way I immediately started double-clicking the tab bar for new tabs agin. Old habits may die hard, but apparently they can be revived pretty easily :-)
I’ve not had any crashes or problem so far, which I expect because I never had any issue with the beta either.
I really wish Apple would have refined what they did with TOT instead of killing it completely. I really liked it.
Well then, that’s my only complaint! :D Safari 4 seems really awesome otherwise! The fact that I found something minor to complain about proves it. ;)
i’m lovin it!
I want my tabs-on-top back! I really loved it and I hate the compression effect when opening a new tab…
I miss tabs on top!!!
It saved so much screen real-estate, in fact, its why I’m using chrome now!
Please apple, I want to love safari, and trashing the TOT was a nail in the coffin, seriously, at least GIVE THE OPTION for the position of the tabs! PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK!
not happy with this relaese: i want my tabs on top back and the crashes every 5-10min are really annoying.. the beta version was more satisfying and stable for me :(
PLEASE, BRING BACK TABS ON TOP AND BLUE PROGRESS BAR!!!
i immediately switched back to the beta.
and i don’t feel warm and fuzzy about the stupid old position, were tabs doesn’t make any sence
I agree with the majority of posters about the tabs on top feature. This was a major feature for me. As a web developer I usually work with 30-40 tabs spread over several windows. With tabs on top it was way easier to move them around.
Now if you have a (single tab) window, you can’t just dock it to another one – instead you are forced to open a second tab to be able to drag the page to a new window. What a complete waste of keyboard and mouse clicks…
In contrast I actually like the new small progress indicator.
Just noticed that you can have the tab bar always visible… though this is a waste of space if you are working with only one page open in that window IMO…
Wow, I’m really surprised by the response for the Tabs On Top feature. When Apple first released the beta, everyone was complaining about how difficult it was to use. I guess folks needed just a bit of time to get used to it. Now we all want the feature back – though I would like it as an OPTION.
Seriously, apple, bring me my TOT back. They were the greatest space and time saver refinement ever, with out it my page looks cluttered and old-fashion. Please please please put it as an option!
jjjj
Mixed feelings for the Tabs On Top feature.
Fact is, there are numerous usability issues with Apple’s solution to this (emphasis on Apple – Opera’s solution under Jon Hicks seems much better). Most were identified by Gruber in this article at Daring Fireball.
From my perspective, the information hierarchy seems correct with Tabs On Top, but I’m accustomed to looking and clicking below the URL bar for tabs. But I would adapt to Tabs On Top if Apple gave me the option to do so.
Please please give me an OPTION for the tabs on top! I’ve been surfing for the last 15 minutes and all I can see other people angry about the change.
I LOVED the TOT feature, it was the one thing that made me switch from FF. Never going back, but still would be nice to have an option for it :(
One more vote for tabs on top. I enjoyed that feature from day one. Between the lose of that and the reports of this new non-beta release crashing, I’ll stick with the beta for as long as possible.
I like the Top Sites idea because it notifies me of website changes, letting me quickly scan the blogs and news sources I frequent to see if there’s anything new instead of having to check each one by one. But for this I’d just like it to keep the sites fixed, instead of suggesting new ones. Is there a way to deactivate this and let me only keep the 12 or so that I’ve “pinned”, instead of always cluttering up the space with new “suggested” top sites?
Yeah, I miss tabs-on-top, too! I was fully expecting to see it as an official option in prefs … no such luck. Holding out for a hack else I have browser remorse :(
Why no option for tabs on top?
I just spent the last few months getting used to it again and now i have another load of space taking up my screen. What’s that about!
I have had a couple of crashes at startup which is not a good sign, but my gripe is that any customizing of the toolbar is lost every time Safari 4 is closed.
That’s a real pain.
Taking away the Safari tabs on top is a huge loss to many consumers. (For those that didn’t like it, I’m sure you’re competent enough to simply click a preference setting and change it as in the beta.)
Given the amount of our lives we spend in browser windows, maximizing useful screen space is just as important as maximizing the space in my tiny New York apartment. I have never rejoiced to much in response to software as when Safari 4 beta came out. Like a kid in a candy store. The easy ability to remove the usually-useless address bar with command pipe is great.
But the best improvement: Tabs on top, getting rid of useless title bar grey space!!!
Now they took it away. Please bring back the tabs on top option. Please!
Honestly, it can’t complicate the software much to default to the old wasteful bottom tabs and include a preference box for the rest of us space-loving tabs-on-top folks.
In the meantime, I’m back to Firefox, and hoping for Chrome soon.
What have the 64-bit to do with speed / performance?
Why is it that when something new comes out.. everybody just wants to whine? There are so many great features, as explained on the website and in various blogs. I’ve used it and it’s waaay faster, waaay cleaner, and has more to it than ever before. All you see is the tabs issue.. which, in the grand scheme of things; is such a small, subjective, inconsequential matter that it makes your entire discussion a waste of time. Live with it, “space-loving tabs-on-top folks”.
Jeesus.. go outside or something.
I’m with Luke.
I started using Safari few days back and I fall in love with this browser. It’s actually Firefox + social networking = Safari..
Ok…i will confess :O) My second post were late, i was tired, and safari misbehaved…..until i emptied the cache (blush) iknow. Safari works like a charm now, but i did have a crash with the message that the Flash plug-in caused the crash. So here is my BIG question, was this not one of the new features in safari??, anti plug-in crash feature?.
Switched to Safari 4 from Firefox on account of the significantly improved speed, and the bookmark tab folders thing is really getting to me. Here’s the problem: in both Window’s and Mac’s menubar, if you click on a drop-down option, like File, and then move your mouse over to Edit, File automatically closes and Edit opens. In Firefox, folders in the bookmark bar work the same way – and really, why shouldn’t they? Safari UI designers apparently have other ideas though. Why the hell wouldn’t they support a predominant UI behavior? I’m not the only one for whom Safari behaves this way, right?
constant crashes endless loading times what is this?? how do I get back to the beta version, this is the worst apple product I have ever experienced. I hope this is not the future of new products, this is crap.
please, please, please at least give us the option to use TOT again. I didn’t realise how much I’ve come to like it until it’s gone!
apart from that it seems fast and stable. nice
tabs on top was fantastic and truly innovative. please give us options, apple! thank you!
Safari 4 crashes a lot now. Back in the beta it did not even crash this much. On my Mac OS X it crashed 5 times in 2 minute. On windows it crashed 3 times in 1 minute for me. I have always liked apple but safari in my opinion is a disappointment and had a lot of potential.It is not the worlds fastest browser on windows. I did benchmark tests such as v8, Sun and Google chrome beat safari 4. On mac however Safari is the fastest
I can’t really relate to the People who Report that Safari crashes a lot. I have had it in use now for 2 full work days surfing lots of pages simultaneously. I haven’t had a single crash since the update. Although I experienced lots of crashes with Flash involved in the latest beta.
All those complaining, I suggest cleaning all profile data and temporary files since there seem to be more than just minor changes since the latest beta.
I use lots of Alpha and Beta Software and most of the crashes after an update relate to “dirty” profile data…
Just my 2ct
how do you suggest?
@deviantdj: The reason tabs on top sucked for me is that it made the tabs unusable with a tablet. When i click on a tab there’s always a slight movement to the left or right depending on how fast i move the cursor up there. In the old tabs this was a non-issue, but in Safari 4 I always ended up moving the windows a little to the left or the right, and the tabs was never selected. I had to stop everything I was doing and concentrate on clicking the fracking tab with a firm, steady hand instead of just “gesturing” over it.
Also, moving the tabs were awful. Instead of just grabbing it and dragging the thing around I needed to stop, select the desired tab (if there was too much opened, which is almost always the case), and click the handle thing to drag it. AND, I have to be careful and not go too fast, or I could close the tab on the side.
I installed Safaristand just to make this browser usable by having the thumbnail sidebar, and abandoning the title/tabbar altogether. So i see this news that the tabs on top are gone as a sign that Apple came to her senses. I won’t miss it for a bit.
Damn, some typos up there. Sorry about that.
Wow– what a flop. I mean– it crashes every time I try to open a new tab… it hangs up on me every 10 minutes without doing much… I mean come-on! If the fix is not available soon I will moving all my links and settings to Firefox. I love Safari… but this is just frustrating as hell. I wish I had a way to restore the previous version. Argh!!!!!!
Safari 4.0… wow, what a flop. I mean– it crashes every time I try to open a new tab… it hangs up on me every 10 minutes without doing much… I mean come-on! If the fix is not available soon I will moving all my links and settings to Firefox. I love Safari… but this is just frustrating as hell. I wish I had a way to restore the previous version. Argh!!!!!!
Zoom Text Only should be the default preference.
Also, I have to say the beta seemed much faster than v1…
Never mind the tabs, what about all the other issues, many from Safari 3. I bet none of them are fixed.
The page doesn’t blank when a new tab is launched from a link. You can’t pause and restart downloads. The tab bar doesn’t scroll. “Open links in new tabs” is not possible *within* Safari. Closing a tab doesn’t return you to the tab you launched it from. Cut and paste of page content into a rich text editor strips all the HTML. You can’t remove individual entries from remembered text fields. It renders spaces at the start of a line when there is a double space in the source.
Allister
The page doesn’t blank when a new tab is launched from a link. (yes it does)
The tab bar doesn’t scroll. (yes it does use cntrl tab)
Open links in new tabs” is not possible *within* Safari. (yes it is)
I also contend that Safari is not faster than Firefox. Sure it may render some benchmark page faster, but I find it beachballs rather a lot more than Safari. The overall experience is about the same speed.
Good fun 2 use but i’m sure that it will get much better.
good fun but it will get better. I can’t wait till safari 5 (if there is 1).
I love the new Safari, no probs, but I did get a new MacBook only 2 weeks ago, so that might be eliminating any conflicts. However, I do not like that past searches come up every time you begin to type in the address bar. For people or families that share computers it feels invasive. I realize you can empty the history, but usually I like to keep it for a week or too, just not see it every time I type a web address. Any suggestions?
All i really want is the old mac-like interface back. The loading inside the address bar and the way it changed the font of pages were my favorite parts. I never really liked TOT, but I bet if it had the mac-interface combined with it it would be pretty awesome. This is what I get for using Windows. So for now, Im sticking with good-old Safari 3. Looking at all the complaints, I dont plan on trying Safari 4 out, anytime soon.
To make it short: Safari has been ruined…
Having horrifically slow dialup, I so miss the progress bar on the URL bar that indicated about how much longer it would take to load each page. And it seems to take longer to load pages with this new version. As a matter of fact, the new “loading” spinning ball is still spinning, thus still loading this page after 4 minutes. I hope we can get back that progress bar – if just for us non-high speed sufferers out there!
El,
Whoa – dial up. Here’s something you may want to look at – Opera 10 (currently in BETA, I believe). It has a feature called TURBO that uses a proxy server to compress graphics and offer significantly reduced download times. Seriously, it’s a great feature – I’ve tested it on a dial-up connection.
Sure, you’re going to sacrifice the native Mac feel of Safari, but I think you’ll find, from a pragmatic viewpoint, you’re saving yourself a lot of time. You can read about it here:
http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
Highest regards.
I work in IT and have dabbled in all browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Opera, IE) never being able to settle on one. I’ve had a Mac since the original but use a PC at work and was pleased to hear Safari 4 going final.
My mistake.
Safari locks up my Windows XP 2.5GHZ PIV with 1GB of RAM almost every 30 -45 minutes. Typically at least 65 % of my memory is free and with only two to three tabs open Safari’s memory usage will jump to almost 200MB. It takes six seconds approx to open a new tab.
Hopefully they revisit Safari 4.
Don’t upload Safari 4 if you have a clamshell iBook.
Apple decided not to support 800×600 displays.
All web pages will show up with no scrollbars and almost impossible to view..
Wait for Safari 4.01 to see if they decide to support ibooks again.
If you upgraded to 4, you’ll be just better off installing FireFox instead of trying to get 3 or 4 beta reinstalled. (It’s a pain)
It’s not just the location of the tabs, Tabs on Top-it was easier to combine windows, manage overflow tabs that don’t fit, etc.
Bring back Tabs on Top!
Nothing new…
I want tabs on top, it makes more sense.
I want the loading bar inside the address bar.
I’ve installed the beta version, now, with the final release I miss those features. I’m going back to my original browser.
I have never had a problem logging into iGoogle with Firefox, so I have no need for a browser such as Safari 4 that can load the page four times faster. Even if Safari 4 is the fastest browser around, it will not grant users access to sites any different from the ones that Firefox or Internet Explorer has access to, because it is merely a browser. Browsers are almost all the same, so forgive me for my lack of enthusiaism.
Why is it that every time I open Safari, Apple appears in the address box?
This is very irritating as I have to take time to erase. This just started about five days ago. I would like this corrected.