The Lifestream of Jon Moss

Safari 4 Beta First Impressions

February 24 2009, 10:35pm

As we pointed out earlier today, Safari 4 Beta is out and you can download it now. But should you? Good question.

The first thing to consider is that this is not one of those betas that sits happily alongside your existing copies of Safari. The installer demands a restart of the whole system and will overwrite older copies of Safari. Yes folks, that version of Safari 3.x that you’ve grown fond of will be wiped out. Any plugins and extras you have plugged in to it will cease to work. I’ve no doubt that Apple is very confident that this Beta release won’t break people’s systems (otherwise it wouldn’t have been made a public beta), but still: it would be nice if the installer clearly alerted you to this before you clicked install. The first thing you see on launch is a brief welcome movie, then the “Top sites” view. You’ll also notice the new tabs arrangement: right at the top of the window.

All of these are other people’s ideas. “Top sites” has been in several recent versions of Opera under the name “Speed dial”. Apple’s version automatically populates with the sites you visit most often, judged by analysis of your history; Opera’s version is a selection of sites chosen by the user. Both show a grid of web page previews, although Apple’s is heavier on the eye candy. The new tab design is very clearly in homage to Google’s Chrome. You might like the design of the new tabs or you might not; personally, I’m neither enchanted nor bothered by them. It does seem odd, though, to see yet another bunch OS X window design elements appearing from nowhere; and a Safari 4 window with many tabs now looks odd with windows from other applications behind:

Is Top Sites any good? I suppose it will be useful for a lot of people, but to me, it’s just another case of visual over-indulgence. I don’t need it; but then, I don’t have to use it. The next thing to catch my attention is bookmarks, and this is where I start to get completely baffled. The new bookmarks manager looks like iTunes:

And it bothers me, because for the life of me I just can’t understand this endless obsession with Coverflow. Yes, it’s pretty neat for browsing (small) collections of music. And I suppose some people might find it useful in the Finder (although I certainly never use it there). And now here it is in my bookmarks, and I just don’t see the point. My browsing history is just that - a list of metadata that describes where I have been. I don’t need to see what it looks like, I just want to find it quickly. Maybe I’m being over-grouchy, but to me this seems like eye candy for eye candy’s sake. My very first reaction, on seeing bookmarks displayed this way, was to look for some way of switching it off. Is there anything I do like? Yes. I like the Smart Search Field, which seems to have a very good idea of what things I might be searching for before I’ve finished typing them:

What else do I like? The Full History Search is nice, but I think it needs a more arduous test than just searching my history of a few hours of browsing. Try it after a month, and see how it fares then. So, is Safari 4 likely to lure me away from Camino? Not a chance.