- Hot Feature: Top Sites
- Hot Feature: Cover Flow
- Hot Feature: Visual History Search
- Hot Feature: Blinding Speed
- Hot Feature: Standards Compliance to the Max
- Warm Feature: Full-Page Zoom (Sometimes Bigger Is Better)
- Warm Feature: Improved Web Searches
- Lukewarm Feature: More Windows-like Appearance on PCs
- Not-So-Hot Feature: Tab Relocation Program
- Summary
Hot Feature: Blinding Speed
This new version retains Safari's laurels as the fastest browser around—both in displaying HTML and in executing JavaScript. Here's what Apple reports:
Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests[...].
[...]Safari offers top-flight HTML performance—the best on any platform—loading pages three times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.
Additional speed gains are attained by using speculative loading to preload a page's style information, documents, and scripts.
Several sites that have benchmarked Safari 4 indicate that Apple's claims are valid. Claims aside, Safari 4 just feels speedy. Load lags that I routinely experience in Internet Explorer 7, for example, aren't as noticeable or as lengthy in Safari 4.