Apple Safari 4 browser for Mac and PC: CoverFlow the Web

Apple has announced the beta release of Safari 4 -- the latest edition of the Apple Web browser, for both PC and Mac.

Safari 4 includes the new Nitro engine for rendering Web pages, which Apple claims makes Safari not only the world's fastest browser -- something we'll be testing, naturally -- but also the fastest renderer of JavaScript, with rendering speeds 30 times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and three times faster than Mozilla's Firefox 3.

Other new features include 'Top Sites', which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, 'Full History Search' for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself -- something Opera has been doing for a while.

Apple's Cover Flow has also been incorporated for browsing bookmarks, in the same way album art can be browsed in iTunes.

Safari 4 is in beta for both Mac and PC, available as a free download from today. Hit up the download page here, and keep your eyes peeled on Crave for a full hands-on report and PC benchmark results.