Apple has released the final version of Safari 4. With it, the company has delivered a number of subtle changes from the earlier betas and told us what to expect out of Safari when Snow Leopard ships in September.
One of the bullet point announcements during Bertrand Serlet's talk about Apple's software innovations in Leopard and Snow Leopard was the immediate release of the final version of Safari 4. The browser has been in beta since February of 2009 and introduced a number of user interface changes that proved to be highly contentious.
The most polarizing of these was the decision to place browsing tabs pointing upwards and invading the title bar area. This, plus the decision to remove the loading progress bar, set off the Safari userbase, but some of those tweaks have now been changed.
With the final version of Safari 4, Apple has changed both of these, opting for middle-ground compromises. On the tab situation, Apple has merely updated the visual appearance slightly and returned the tabs to their original home beneath the bookmarks bar. Many people find this arrangement much easier to digest, as it again draws a better distinction between the coordination needed to move the whole window or reorganize you tabs.
On a less-discussed point, Apple has changed the location of the option to leave the tab bar on at all times. You can now tweak this behavior via the View menu (Show/Hide Tab Bar).
The second big change is to the loading progress indicators. In the betas, Apple opted to remove the progress bar that loaded behind the address text box, and instead chose to move to a spinning indicator on the tabs themselves. In the final version, this is replaced by a loading widget attached to the right half of the address bar. This version is much more visible compared to the spinners on tabs, as they would sometimes appear to get lost in the color contrast of the spinner itself and the background color of their tab. The new indicator you see above to the right is much more obvious, but still lacks the precision of letting the user know exactly what percentage of the page has already loaded.
Along with this loading indicator, Apple has reinstated the "stop" button, which was absent from the betas. Prior to version four, Safari had included an "innovative" dual-purpose stop/reload button that changed context depending on the state of the browser. When that was removed from the fourth version, many users were confused. Apple still included a reload button, positioned to the right side of the location bar, but it was now in a weird spot and non-configurable by standard Cocoa toolbar processes. The new progress loading indicator, however, displays in this same area and adds in a small button marked with an "X" which can be used to stop the loading of a page.
Conveniently, this is in the exact same location as the reload button. In a sense, the original functionality has been revived, albeit in a slightly less configurable or user-friendly fashion.
On future fronts, Safari 4 has been tweaked to offer a few additional features for users of 10.6 Snow Leopard, launching in September. Bertrand Serlet gave a short demo on a new feature dubbed "Crash Resistance." This is a feature seen in a browsers like Google Chrome which run browser plug-ins like Flash in their own process.
This means that if a plug-in (Flash for example) misbehaves and crashes, your browser will not crash as a result. The only effect will be that the small area where the plug-in was loading will turn white and contain a brick plug-in icon. Bertrand mentioned that browser plug-ins were, by themselves, the single largest instigator of crashes in OS X.
The final update that Snow Leopard users will see is additional performance gains in Safari. One of the big updates in 10.6 is that many of Apple's applications will be running in full 64-bit mode which will allow them to access more memory, and in certain circumstances do certain types of calculations a lot faster. Serlet quoted a full 50 percent improvement in JavaScript speed (as judged by the Webkit project's SunSpider benchmark) over the 32-bit version of Safari 4 when run in 10.6 and 64-bit mode.
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