Safari 4 beta released, ads a bunch of new features we’ve seen before

Posted Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 6:47 am by Jason Cartwright |

Today we’ve received yet another browser update, this time it’s not IE, Firefox or even Chrome, but rather Apple’s Safari. It’s currently still in beta, but arrives with a bunch of new features appears to be quite stable.

New Features

Top Sites – Not unlike Opera’s home screen, Safari 4 offers a 3D wall of your most commonly used sites. This view can be customized to contain 6, 16 or 24 thumbnails. Users can also pin a site to ensure it remains in the Top Sites view.

Tabs – While tabs are not new to Safari, the way they’re handled is. They’ve now got the chrome-esc above the address bar look. Even better they’ve also picked up the ability to drag tabs from one Safari window to another. This is a great feature especially when viewing 2 windows side by side in Windows 7. As normal these days, tabs can be re-ordered.

Before

After

Coverflow History – Borrowing from iTunes, Safari now uses the Coverflow to Safari’s history. This provides a preview of the website in your history, so if your a heavy browser, finding a site you’ve been to in the past should be all that much easier. 

Unfortunately the Bookmarks don’t go and grab a thumbnail of the site, this should be fixed before the final version.

Full page zooming – Another feature that’s been around in IE since version 7, Safari have added zoom not only to the text, but to the full page. This means the layout isn’t broken when zooming.

Overall there are some changes in Safari 4, but pay no attention to Apple’s claimed 150 features. What they call a feature is mostly fixing things and borrowing features from the existing browsers.

There’s a full list of the “new” features, over at Apple.com. Safari 4 beta is available for Mac or Windows.