The final version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC desktops, released today, leaves rival browsers in the dust with a speedy JavaScript engine and standards-compliant WebKit rendering platform. Apple announced that it has finalized Safari 4 at today’s WWDC keynote address. The browser is now available for OS X (Tiger and Leopard) as well as Windows (XP and Vista) and packs virtually no new features compared with the latest beta that has been out since late February.
Apple executives gave the most stage time to highlight Top Sites, the eye candy feature that renders thumbnails of your most visited sites mid-air, with cool reflections. However, many would be likely turning it off as it can be a significant resource hog on slower systems. While the browser lacks settings toggle for Top Sites, there are a number of Safari hacks that can turn the feature off.
On a brighter front, Apple claims that Safari 4 remains the world’s fastest web browser, citing tests that portray the browser 7.8 times faster at JavaScript interpreting than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and five times faster performance over Chrome 2. Powered by a byte-code optimized engine dubbed SquirFish Extreme, JavaScript in Safari should perform 50 percent faster when the browser is used with Snow Leopard (available in September) because the browser’s JavaScript engine runs in Snow Leopard’s 64-bit mode. An on-stage demo wowed the crowd with near-instant rendering of Google Maps, for example.
Safari 4’s WebKit rendering platform passes the Acid3 test with a 100/100 score. The test is used to measure how well a browser follows common web standards, an important factor for web developers who can rely on the browser to render web pages as intended, as opposed to spending additional time and money on putting in extra code to counter for the rendering inconsistencies. For instance, current IE8 version scores just 21/100, the least of all browsers, meaning developers need to put in IE-specific code to make the browser render pages correctly.
The presentation highlighted “crash resistance” as a new feature, stemming from the design that calls for a sandboxed environment that isolates tabs and plugins in their own processes, just like Google’s Chrome. Safari 4 also decodes QuickTime files faster due to a hardware-accelerated engine and packs a new streaming method that works with any webserver. Crash resistance will work only under Snow Leopard since it leverages new technologies that the operating system offers. The browser will come built-in with Snow Leopard.
Safari 4 also features an iTunes-like Cover Flow view of your bookmarks and browsing history and several other features previously described in my review of Safari 4 Beta.
Apple also said that the iPhone OS 3.0 software will include the latest version of mobile Safari. The company claims the browser packs three times faster JavaScript engine over mobile Safari version that ships with iPhone 2.2 firmware. In addition, it supports HTTP streaming of audio and video courtesy of
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