June 08, 2009, 4:57 PM — Apple on Monday released Safari 4, the next version of its Web browser for OS X and Windows users. The updated browser will also ship with Snow Leopard once the planned OS X 10.6 update arrives in September.
Safari 4 has been available as a public beta since February, when Apple unveiled the new version of the browser. At the time, improvements to Safari included the faster Nitro engine; a Top Sites feature that gave users a visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search for finding titles, Web address, and text of recently viewed pages; a Cover Flow view for browsing bookmarks; and improved tabbed browsing.
During Monday's WWDC keynote, Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of OS X, touted the speed improvements to Safari, claiming the browser is faster than Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, and Google's Chrome 2. Safari 4 is seven times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Serlet.
Apple also noted a crash-resistance feature in Safari 4. The leading cause of crashes in OS X comes from browser plug-ins, Apple says; in the new version of Safari, if a plugin crashes, only that part of the page will be broken, while the browser will remain open.
Macworld will have more details on Safari 4 as they become available.
