Safari 4: Real-world test

By Nate Lanxon on 26 February 2009, 11:07am

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Although our benchmarks proved Apple's birthing pool-fresh Safari 4 is the zippiest browser on the planet, figures only count for a single slice of the overall pie of user experience. Safari 4 efficiently sneezed pages on to our unibody MacBook's display with enviable speed, but is it actually a good browser?

In short: uh huh, it is. It's got some neat new features, although many are recognisable as key features from other PC browsers. It claims to have expanded on its underlying technological framework to support new features of HTML 5 and CSS effects, and it passed the Acid3 standards-compliancy test with perfect results -- something neither Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 can claim to do.

We tested on a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo unibody MacBook, running OS X 10.5.6 with all updates applied.

Top Sites

You can have six, 12 or 24 'top sites' in the slick Top Sites start page, and it can be used as a home page or as the default view for empty tabs -- something not just reminiscent of Chrome's nine-panel home page, but also Opera's speed dial, Opera being the first browser to natively implement such a feature.

Additionally, Apple has given Safari its Cover Flow technology. It lets you flick through your bookmarks just like you can flick through album art in iTunes. Oh praise the saints. Wait, don't just yet -- it might not be at all useful.

Safari takes a screenshot of each Web page and updates it each time you visit that page. But it's like Cerie in 30 Rock: great to look at, but fundamentally useless. You'll never use it. Apple obviously wants Cover Flow to be a part of its mission statement, but outside the quickly-look, quickly-discard world of Finder and iTunes, its visual appeal outranks its benefits to productivity.

A more useful implementation would allow each bookmark window to update in the background to reflect current page content. Or perhaps you could hit the space bar and bring up the Web page in a Quick Look-esque window for quickly checking new stuff. Ah well, maybe in Safari 5.

That said, it makes a separate feature a little more attractive: Full History Search...