Apple has made available for download a new iteration of Safari for Windows and Mac, a browser release described as “the world's fastest and most innovative” in the Cupertino company's usual extravagant marketing style. Outside of new limits in speed, and the new standard in innovation, Safari 4 represents another first for Apple. The successor of Safari 3 embraces the Windows platform tight with a new graphical user interface. One of the failures of Safari 3 was related to Apple attempting to shove the browser's specific Mac OS GUI down the throat of Windows users and expect them to applaud the new UX. But Safari 3 just felt backwards on Windows and the new UI indicates that Apple has also noticed that Windows users aren't willing to go left instead of right to close a window.

With Safari 4, Apple falls in line with other Windows software developers, and makes the browser feel right at home on the platform. According to the Cupertino-based company the browser is designed to play nice with Windows XP SP2 and later and Windows Vista RTM and later. I also installed it on Windows 7 Build 7201 and it worked like a charm.

Apple enumerates no less than 150 features of Safari trying to account for the claim that the product leads the pack in terms of browser innovation. There are indeed features that set Safari 4 apart, at least from some of its competitors, such as CoverFlow, support for multi-touch, and spellchecking, and then again the vast majority of so-called innovative features contain items such as private browsing, search suggestions, view source, RSS aggregation and bookmark folders just as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc.

As far as speed is concerned, Apple indicates that Safari 4's Nitro engine renders JavaScrip 4.5 times faster than Safari 3, 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8, and 4 times faster than Firefox 3. Safari 4 also has IE8 and Firefox 3 beat when it comes down to HTML page rendering speed, by a factor of three. Of course, when it launched the successor of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft revealed with test results that IE8 rendered pages faster than its rivals. When it launched Chrome 2.0, Google also pointed out that additional V8 JS rendering engine horsepower left competitor products in the dust.

One aspect in which Safari 4 has Internet Explorer 8 beat hands down, just as rival browsers, is support for modern web standards. Safari 4 supports CSS 3 and HTML 5, and aces the Acid3 Test. Microsoft has yet to embrace HTML Canvas, for example, claiming that CSS 3 and HTML 5 are incomplete standards.