14 DAY TRIAL // With the introduction of an almost finished version of Snow Leopard, Apple launched the final version of Safari 4, the company’s powerful web browser that comes as a standard on Macintosh computers. According to the Mac maker, Safari offers an experience unlike any other web browser out there, trashing Microsoft’s IE8 in executing JavaScript and loading HTML web pages.
“Apple today released Safari 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser,” the company’s press room reveals. “Available for Mac and Windows PCs and introduced as a beta in February of this year, Safari 4 features the Nitro engine which runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari 3,” Apple says.
“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,” the Mac maker further stresses.
Having been built on the the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 4 executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3, 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 reveals. Not surprisingly, Snow Leopard (available this September) will push Safari 4 to its limits, by enabling its 64-bit nature 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, pinpoints. Schiller kicked off WWDC '09 with a keynote address yesterday, aided by his fellow execs, Scott Forstall and Bertrand Serlet.
“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,” Schiller adds.
Safari 4 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.