Safari 3 and 4 on the Same Mac? Yes You Can! (Maybe)

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Maybe I should just get a T-shirt that says “Life is a giant beta” since I’m a sucker for any new application. Like so many others, I grabbed Safari 4 yesterday so I could kick the tires. The beta software kicked me back since it wiped out Safari 3 on my Mac. My usual trick of renaming the older application before installing the new one didn’t work this time. I probably should have known it wouldn’t, since Safari 4 updates the Webkit framework. (By the way: my rename trick works perfectly fine with Firefox 3 and 3.1b2 in case you want to run both versions.)

You can get back to Safari 3 by using the Safari 4 uninstall, rebooting and then downloading version 3.2.1 directly from Apple. If you do want both, perhaps this list of tricks from BeatnikPad will work for you. I haven’t tried it yet as I’m still smarting from the many installs, uninstalls and reboots just to get back to where I was when this fiasco started. ;)

From my perusal of the steps, the advice seems sound enough. You’ll have to run a few Terminal commands and use a Webkit nightly build for Safari 3.x but if all goes well, you should have a close facsimile Safari 3 and 4 on your Mac. As always with these types of problems, use the solution at your own risk. If my bruises heal quickly from getting back to status quo, I’ll give this a try and report back.

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