Apple has released the public of Safari 4 for Mac/Windows. The new release, features their new Nitro Javascript engine which supposedly increases Javascript loading speed by over 4 times in comparison to Safari 3.
Apple claims Safari 4’s new Nitro JavaScript engine executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Microsoft’s IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. It’s also said to load HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.
Safari 4 also includes a handful of new user interface features, including:
- Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;
- Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;
- Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks “as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes;”
- Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
- Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
- Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
- Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;
- built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
- a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.
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