14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has updated Safari 4 with minor changes, including enhanced compatibility between Safari 4.0 and iPhone '09. Addressing issues between the browser and iPhoto’s Places and Facebook publishing features, Safari 4.0.1 is 43.8 MB in size and comes as a free download for both Mac and Windows users.
According to the Mac maker, “This update addresses incompatibilities between Safari 4.0 and certain features in iPhoto '09, including Places and Facebook publishing.” Apple also stresses that, “Safari 4 makes browsing more intuitive and enjoyable with innovative features, such as Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow, and support for modern web standards like HTML 5 and advanced CSS Effects.”
Safari 4 executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3, having been built on the Nitro JavaScript engine, according to Apple. As far as HTML is concerned, web pages filled with such content are loaded more than three times faster in Safari 4, compared with Microsoft’s latest iteration of Internet Explorer.
Safari 4 is also the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, Apple claims. And, with Snow Leopard (available this September), Safari's 64-bit nature will surface to take the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine up by 50 percent.
“The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said soon after delivering the keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. “Safari is enjoyed by 70 million users worldwide and with its blazing fast speed, innovative features and support for modern web standards, it’s the best browser on any platform,” he added.
Apple also announced that Safari 4 had topped 11 million downloads in three days from its “stable” debut. Six million of those downloads are credited to Windows users.
Safari 4.0.1 can be downloaded and used for free on any Mac running OS X versions 10.5.7 Leopard and 10.4.11 Tiger, with both Intel and PPC processors being supported. Top Sites and Cover Flow on Mac OS X Tiger require a Quartz-Extreme-compatible video card. For Windows PC users, XP SP2 or Windows Vista is required. On both Mac and PC, Safari 4 requires a minimum of 256MB RAM.