- 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: Standards Compliance to the Max
Apple has gone all out to ensure that Safari 4 is compliant with major web standards. In fact, Acid3 standards tests conducted by Betanews show that it's currently the only 100% standards-compliant browser. What does this mean for you?
- If you're a user, all standards-compliant websites will display and work in Safari exactly as their designers intended.
- If you're a web designer, you won't have to perform magic tricks to get your site to work for Safari users. Follow the standards to ensure that your pages will work.
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of non-compliant websites—many of which were crafted with Internet Explorer in mind. These sites may still look or work differently in Safari than when opened in Internet Explorer. For example, my favorite financial site, Yahoo! Finance, offers streaming, auto-updating stock quotes. Even though the Acid3 tests show Safari 4 to be 100% compliant and Internet Explorer 7 only 12% compliant, the feature works flawlessly in Internet Explorer but not at all in Safari.