14 DAY TRIAL // Forget about Safari 3, Safari 4 is here. Well, at least the first Beta version. Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla and Google are not the only companies cooking the next versions of their respective browsers, namely Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Firefox 3.1 and Google Chrome 2.0. Apple is also moving its Safari browser forward, on both Mac OS X and on Windows. In this context, Apple has made available for download the first Beta version of Safari 4, the successor of Safari 3, on February 24, 2009.
Labeled as “the world's best browser,” by Apple and only Apple, Safari 4 Beta is available for download in two variants, bundled with iTunes and plain vanilla. According to the company's official download page, Safari 4 Beta is designed to integrate seamlessly with “any PC running Windows XP or Windows Vista. [with at least] 500-MHz Pentium-class processor or better and 256MB of RAM.”
However, in the notification of the availability of Safari 4 Beta, Apple indicates that the browser is set up to play nice with “Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista.” There is no word at this point in time of the integration of Safari 4 Beta with Windows 7 Beta.
On the launch of the Beta, Apple trumpeted Safari 4 as the “world’s fastest & most innovative browser,” revealing that the underlying Nitro engine achieved performances 4.2 times faster than Safari 3 when it came down to rendering JavaScript. In addition to advances in terms of performance, Safari 4 Beta also comes to the table with strong support for modern web standards, including HTML 5 and CSS 3.
“Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3,” Apple stated.