Safari 4 Beta Released

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

whatsnew-topsites-20090217Apple just released the first public iteration of Safari 4. In the list of latest features we see the introduction of cover flow into their history and bookmarks and a nice panorama of a user’s top sites.

For us web developers, a list of very exiting features has been added:

  • Acid 3 compliance: Now all the features tested by the Acid 3 test are available to developers for the Safari browser
  • Offline storage: Here, Apple added not only the HTML5 implementation of offline storage but also a dev toolbar to review the data in the local database. Very cool.
  • Developer tools: Similar to Firebug, Safari now comes with a full development suite including a DOM inspector, speed profiling, script viewer and debugger and more.

As a fan of the upcoming HTML5 offline storage spec, I am very excited about Safari’s introduction of the local database navigator. This sets a new high in web-browser technology and will be a standard other browsers are matched up against. Hopefully, IE and Firefox will introduce their own versions of this tool.

For a full list of features, visit the features sections of the Safari section on apple.com.

Have you tried the new version of Safari? What are your thoughts on the new features?

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