In what was a very quiet release that no one knew was coming (from the lack of rumor sites following it - too focused on new iMac's) Safari 4 has hit the streets.  And now this release of Safari is better then before, not perfect but getting closer.  So I wanted to do a quick review and I also wanted to answer some of the critics, in particular Mr. Paul Thurrott who I've been reading his pages for years and decided it's time to start answering some of his claims.

What's New

In typical Apple fashion they are announcing some crazy number of features.  At the bottom you can see all 150 features of Safari.  First off, Apple is not claiming 150 new features, just that their browser has 150 features which is great marketigng but pretty stupid overall.  So what is new:

Tabs: Apple has moved the tabs to the top of the browser like Google has done with Chrome.  Now I have been a heavy Firefox user for years now and I have felt it was a great browser but I loved the move of the tabs to the top of the screen because I also thought it made more sense.  I found Chrome to be a little too unpolished in spots for me - it is very beta - so I've been sticking with Firefox but Apple does the tabs really well on top.  

What don't I like about them?  The tabs can be moved from one spot - makes sense - you need to be able to move windows around so you need to have somewhere to grab.  The problem is they are using the icon that has historically been the resize window icon in the Mac OSX days for years.  For a Windows only person this may not be an issue but for someone who has spent a great deal of time on OSX it might seem a little strange.  My only other complaint is something I have loved for years in Firefox (that IE7 and 8 still are missing) and that was the ability to close tabs without them be active.  Hover over a disabled tab and the close button appears.  For Safari, I'm scared I might accidently close a tab when I trying to move the window.

Thurrott and others have complained that the peak-through of Vista and 7 make this unusable on a PC.  This just doesn't make any sense or hold any water.  Maybe under extreme situations depending on what the background is but take a look at my "orange mountain" background.  Notice, the the title has an outer glow making it extremely easy to see what the tab actually is.  Even the example Thurrott gives on his webpage of this problem is easy to read.  And I would argue if this was true for Safari then it's true for every application.  How about Office 2007 Quick Launch bar?

Top Sites: Is a fancy way to display all of the recent websites.  This is an extension of what IE 7 did years ago, what Google repeated and now Apple has done the same thing.  The only difference is that they decided to put the entire thing on a curved window.  Now what is cool is you can edit these and pin them like you can documents in the office button in Office 2007, so for some users this will have a familiar feel to it.

Some have complained that this is simply eye-candy and serves no purpose.  Which I respond, sure it's eye candy, but isn't just about everything on the computer.  Can someone really tell me I need fancy 3-D cube effects when I change screens or that my Vista machine needs to have an "peak-through" title bar.  I mean, do you feel more productive now in Vista vs XP because the title bar is transparent in Vista?  I cannot think of a single time that has increased my productivity.  It gives it a cool effect but that is all.  That is the same thing for Safari.

Cover Flow and Search: Now I'll admit, I was taken back when I saw cover flow for the first time in iTunes.  I said, that is really cool, but I've never actually used it.  On my iPhone, I use it to demo to people and who them how cool the iPhone is but I've never actually used it for any meaningful purpose.  The OSX finder has it built in.  Again, wow that is fancy I can whip through a bunch of documents and useful if I'm looking for a particular document by view.  But here is Safari it actually makes more sense to me.  Now others have called it "the most recent and most egregious use of Apple's Cover Flow display."  And for them, they simply are not thinking about how to use the feature.

I like you may have hundreds or thousands of pages in your history.  And you may not for the life of you remember what the page was called but what you do remember is what the website looked like.  Typically a search through your history is a painful as you try page after page trying to find that one article you were reading before.  Cover flow search allows you to quickly find a page by look.  The search feature has also been improved to keep more information in the cache so searching through history using the old fashion "enter text" method will get you much more results that are closer to what you were looking for.

Other Features: There are a bunch of other features including address searching, phishing tools and a bunch more but the real winner is the developer tools and the web inspector.  For anyone who builds webpages for a living should take a look at this tool.  I'll go more in-depth on this a later time but know that you can enable the developer menu from the preferences and from there you can see how your web page is rendered by time, script and even turn off items from your stylesheet one element at a time for testing.  This thing might be the best kept secret of Safari 4.  More on this later

Closing Thoughts: So others might dismiss this browser because it's not Firefox or IE on Windows but I seriously suggest people take the time to check it out and see if they like it.  The tabs is what is going to turn people on/off and not because they are transparent just if they can get used to them on the top (same problem for our Chrome friends).  If you are a web developer you should have this on your computer anyways because you should be testing across all platforms but the web inspector is fantastic!  There are paid tools that don't do as much as this does.