I agree with you. I’ve tried it since they launched the Public Beta and I like it!

I dig it. I’m going to have to start utilizing @font-face for sure.

Thanks for the walkthrough! I guess the most appealing parts of Safari 4 will be the cover flow, the top sites as well as the user agent feature. My first experience with Safari 4 is a little bit more neutral than positive due to the difficulty in rearranging tabs and the smaller sizes, but I guess I will get used to them sooner or later that little problem will not stop me from embracing all the other wonderful features Safari 4 has got!

And one more important thing – Safari 4 passed the Acid3 test! *woohoo!*

It takes very little time to get used to the changes in the interface. Coverflow is nice and all but it has been used a bit too much. Looking forward to trying out the web inspector.

Safari 4 is awesome! I’ve never seen such a speed. The new web inspector makes me totally forget Firebug and FF.
Anyone knows where did “Save as web application…” feature go?

PS: if you don’t like the new tab look you can revert to the old one by simpli entering this in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

The inspector you’re praising so much looks exactly (yes, exactly) like the one found in Chrome… http://images.google.com/images?q=google+chrome+inspector

It’s a brilliant tool for debugging, but was broken in the last dev release. Seems fixed and improved in the latest one though.

Firebug is still the best, which is a shame since Firefox feels bloated now that I’m used to Chrome

It’s like they took the best from Chrome and Firefox (and a little bit from iTunes) and put it together…. Too bad I really don’t like the dark grey look of Safari… and like everything from Apple, it tends to became a really big and slow program… If not, remember when iTunes started.

yes its awesome. for real but some of my Jscripts stack in this browser. But i understand coz its still in Beta. looking forward for the final version.

more like they copied chrome to me just my thoughts i love chrome btw!

@rick it’s the webkit inspector – that’s why they both have it. Technically chrome got it from them.

@Rick I never saw the Web inspector in Chrome but you can easily see that it has a very Apple-like UI and doesn’t match the Chrome’s UI, plus it’s been here for some times in Safari, but not with so much features. So this is kind of controversial.

Anyway, I think that Safari 4 might be my new favorite browser. The only thing that kept me from using it was Firebug. Well, no anymore !

I love it! Dev tools is what I have waited for, cover flow is awesome, speed is amazing and I just dumped firefox!

Did you know that you can switch tabs CTRL-TAB now?

Shame that the inspector doesn’t work as smooth as firebug. Like the fact that you can change the css in realtime in firebug is so handy.

Seems they changed the how the text-shadow css property renders. I guess the the v3 of safari was broken. If you have set the values

text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000

you would still get a subtle shadow

now it disapears, you need to to set a bit of blur at least 1px to actally trigger the shadow. Which makes sense.

I was going to write about this but something like this is already on appstorm. And I didn’t think I would have been accepted.

Safari 4 is 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-272792.html

But for me Safari is still missing an important feature: “continue from last time” at startup. I never close my Gmail in Firefox. In Safari, you need to open it everytime you launch the browser. It is quite annoying.

I’m pretty sure the Web Inspector and User Agent String changer have been in since Safari 3… I’ve been using them for developing iPhone sites in Windows.

Very nice. I didn’t know about that Web Inspector thing!

The Web Inspector is not new, surely? I’ve been using it in Safari 3 for months. It looks slightly different in some details in the screenshots above, but otherwise essentially the same.

hey Matt! nice tut there. the world is a small place lol

I’m testing it now for about 3 days and I’m loving it. Still, I don’t imported my stuff from Firefox but I think Safari is going to be my new browser. For now, I wait the final product to completely switch over.

And I really thank you about that Develop Menu. It is great. About the speed, here is a nice article, you may like: http://tinyurl.com/ddmqyh (42 Times faster than IE7, imagine that )

I’ve found a bug so far and thats the JS/Json issue. The Wordpress Plugin “Twitter for Wordpress” from Gonzales doesn’t laod content “very well”. Often it doesn’t load anything, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t load the full count of Tweets I’ve set up. Hoefully, this will be fixed. Bugreport already sent to Cupertino.

Indeed, Safari 4 looks really promising !
Can’t wait to see Firefox 3.1 which is also supposed to bring some new features (like the enhanced JS engine if I’m correct) !

I use it since Monday and am loving it. Apples right. Safari 4 is really really fast and the UI work wonderful on Windows.

This sounds too good to be true…

It breaks my Growl Mail plug-in. I had to disable it. Other than that it rocks.

The user agent just kills them all.. nice one

I’m pretty sure the JavaScript rendering is faster than Chrome. I tested some heavy JavaScript pages and it seemed a lot faster.

I was looking for the Dev option in prefs and can’t find the option. I’m on a mac. Anyone know how to activate that?

I wish there was a way to use FF addons in Safari. I would totally use it more if so.

Yeah the new Web Inspector is awesome! I have been sticking with Firefox just for Firebug, but now that Web Inspector has arrived, I’m stickin’ with Safari.

I’m also a big fan of how the address bar now suggests search results in a very similar to Spotlight. By breaking them down into categories with headings, very slick.

The tabs along the top freaked me out at first (and still kind of does) but I’m quickly getting used to it. I like how the tabs no longer encroach on page space.

And Top Sites ftw!

@John Dangerous: Go to Safari Preferences => Advanced. At the bottom is a checkbox that reads ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’

Why can’t we choose iPhone as a user agent? I know that is an option in Cruz (http://cruzapp.com/) and I figured Apple would be able to do the same.

The “User Agent” Features are totally bogus.

Just tried a quick test with advanced selectors and attribute selectors, both showing up correctly while having IE6 checked under the User Agent pane.

Last time I checked, I didnt know IE6 could handle either.

Whoops.. after digging around.. here is what apple says –

“Change User Agent –
To determine if a website is customizing content for different browsers, change the user agent to have Safari identify itself as a different browser.”

This is really interesting.
Searching around web soon brought to my attention that there is a lack of good photoshop tutorials, which guide photoshop users threw a step by step procedure in order create a website design via photoshop. This article features the best photoshop web design tutorials which teaches you simple effects which can be combined together in order to create a great website design.

This smashes the competition, I’ve always been a fan of firefox and never used safari except for testing purposes but there are some seriously great features with this.

I’m enjoying Safari 4. Took some getting used to having the tabs at the top. Not sure if I like that, but pretty much everything else is good.

Thanks for the tutorial.

Impressive, I’ve never been a huge fan of Safari, but this looks pretty good. I doubt I’ll switch from Firefox, but I’m definitely going to be looking into it.

Chrome and Safari are both based on WebKit. Neither mimic each other, they only get their guts from WebKit.

I thought this browser was speedy, but my coworker informed me that the Mac version of this browser hooks right into the operating system. You know, just like IE does. Doesn’t sound like a good move.

The “Develop” menu has actually been in Safari since before version three, but it has had some small additions in version 4. Not to exciting. The database browser, on the other hand…

Interesante, hay una cantidad de nuevas funciones que me llaman la atencion, creo que voy a checarlo más de cerca… Safari en vez de Mozilla… es una posibilidad.

Ing.
There’s a lot of new stuff, maybe a leave mozilla, maybe.

I really like the snippet thing, Really cool don’t like safari though.

does the development user agents reliable? like ie6 png fixes… etc etc?

thx 4 the tut. downloaded it a few hours ago lets test it

This looks really amazing, although the whole Develop>User Agent> stuff is just all lies… It doesn’t actually render any differently (according to it, IE for Mac 5.2.3 passed all three acidtests with 100 percent!). Unless that isn’t the purpose of it–> It did successfully confuse Facebook, which told me that I shouldn’t use IE for Mac 5.2.3, but instead some other set of browsers. But really, what is the point of just “pretending” to be other browsers, without actually being able to come up with the same rendering peculiarities of them?

Other than that, Safari 4 is looking like a great competitor to Google Chrome for me! The only thing holding me back is the fact that, since Safari isn’t multi-process, if it crashes, it does so all at once, rather than just doing a “Sad-Tab” (which I’ve never had, by the way).

Nice overview. Thanks.

but what you mention only for Apple Mac, not for buggy Windows

M.A.Yoosuf
Browser Powered by Safari 4 beta

I have the feeling that some here are getting a bit confused about the User Agent thing.
It doesn’t change the rendering engin at all ! It just allows you to make sites think you’re a different browser.
A page won’t be rendered as if you were using IE

Cool features, I really like Coverflow, thanks for the tutorial.

@Lorenzo: Thanks for the tip? Does that revert to the old method of dragging the tabs too?

@Rick: I know what you mean by Firefox feeling bloated. It does, and it takes forever to launch. These new speedy browsers like Chrome and Safari launch right after you click them, it isn’t fair.

@Jona Goldman: If you’re a Windows user, you don’t get the metal look. Safari now takes on the native skin of your OS. So Vista users get transparent Window borders and tabs, and those loyal to XP get the blue title bar and the like. As for speed, well, iTunes is not guarantee that Safari will become bloated. It’s been around since 2002 or so, and it’s never gotten to that point. (And for the record, iTunes works well on the Mac side, but it’s really bad on Windows. Just my personal experience.)

@Adam: You are correct, it doesn’t change the rendering engine. (Which would be a great option for development…) It just changes how the browser identifies itself. It’s useful for some things, like sites that block certain browsers, or for testing things that sniff for the User Agent.

inspect elements!! i love it!!

Never try before but after reading this post, i think i should give it a try.

the develop menu isn’t anything new but quite handy! this browser is proving to be one of the, if not the, best you can use on a mac.

@adam

the agents are for processing the information, not necessarily displaying images and css or javascript how another browser would.

I dont know what people are talking about web fonts for as a new thing. Safari 3 supported them. And other browsers support more complicated ones to some extent. I still love them though BTW I love the new safari one. But no top sites in Safari 4 for windows XP. Weird.

I downloaded this for the PC and it works great, page loading is incredibly fast.

Seems like Apple tried to mash together Google Chrome and Firefox into one… but as usual, and as sad of a statement that it might be, there’s really no reason to even explore other browsers as a web developer. Though its a great browser, just like Google Chrome, they dont have the market share and numbers to really constitute caring about how pages are rendered in them. Not to mention, I always have this weird feeling that using a “mac browser” on a PC isn’t really “genuine” and the results I’m seeing wont necessarily be consistent with how things render on a mac.

If I’m not developing FOR it, then I’m not browsing IN it. As widely used as IE might be though, I would never consider using Microsoft browsers full time.

this looks like an improved Google Chrome. nice stealing

Hmm, too bad I’m a windows user, safari is buggy on windows.

I’m totally loving all the new features! I really like how you can change the browser generator! This will help fix bugs in other browsers much faster now!

A lot of people seem to be having problems with their Mail app. Please view this post to see a temporary fix for this:
http://www.safari4beta.com/2009/02/safari-4-beta-and-growl-mail.html

Looks interesting, but when I went to give it a test run myself, I was not presented with those “Oh so glorious” features you all are chattering about. First open does not give me the Top Sites, just takes me to google homepage. Preferences does not have an option for new tab/window to open the Top Sites.

Also cannot find the Cover Flow sections for History/Bookmarks and such…
Am I missing something, or are these just not available on XP?

I like it. The one thing that would prevent me from using it as my primary browser is the way it keeps opening a new page in a new browser, even though I have it set to open in a new tab.

I love the new Safari, it’s very quick but will still be a secondary browser over Firefox, mainly because their are much better debugging options such as Firebug and the Web Development Toolbar. Don’t know what I’d do without them

To those of you talking about Apple “copying” chrome, note that both Chrome is based off WebKit: http://webkit.org/

Does the logo look a bit familiar?

Safari, taking the old stuff and bringing them to a hole-new-level… how far is IE from all that,, like there is more than a decade in between… Safari rules.

So I just tried to test a page on my Mac and used the User Agent with the IE6 emulator. I tried it on a site I developed that I know breaks horribly in IE6 on a PC. The result was not the same as IE6 on a PC. The site did not break like I thought.
So the User Agent is not perfect quite yet. But still one to be reckoned with and to be looked at as a contender. Especially if they perfect the emulator.
The other emulators are not quite working either. They still break the site even thought it is not supposed to.
Like I said. Not perfect but still very good.

I love most all apple stuff – but Chrome is still my default,
I don’t think people(me included) enjoy re-learning
how to do something that has already been
learned (eg: 1st time using office 2007)
All other browsers tabs behave the same kinda way
it’s something I can’t be bothered with -

didn’t F11 used to make full screen in safari3?

@aliaspanther you do not have either direct-x 9.0 or 64 video RAM. it auto disables if you dont meet both of those

@Carlos: It’s juste the user agent, not the rendering engine !
You’re just pretending to be another browser, but you won’t render it like this other browser

Just tried it and…. after ten minutes, I missed my Firefox…. nope, I’m not going to change, Firefox changed the browser market and I’m going to remain loyal to them…. they offer me all my favorite plugins too….

Safari 4 looks great. I still wait for the option to open tabs from last session automatically

If you don’t like the tabs being where they are and also a few other items then you can change them with a fantastic add-on (Mac only) by going to :

http://pointum.com/safari-tweaks.html

I’ve placed my tabs back where they used to be as I just feel the new way isn’t very Mac like or more importantly not very me like

There is also some information on that page for Windows users too though.

Best wishes,

Mark

Safari still looks like iTunes – and i dont like the look of it. Skins would be great, however i will never use Safari

Here we go again, I’ve been switching from safari to firefox back and forth, am about to install this new safari, lets see what’s up =P

Some of you people seriously need to learn what a USER-AGENT is!

When you switch the user-agent all it does is make the browser identify itself as another browser – it DOES NOT change the rendering engine, or try to emulate how another browser would display the site.

Safari will still display the site the same, using it’s own Webkit rendering engine, but the web-server ‘thinks’ it is a different browser, and may send different data (stylesheets, scripts etc.) to the browser.

IT IS NOT A BROWSER EMULATOR!!!

my comment was removed but thanks for clarifying it Jools, hope some of these guys will read it.

@Adam – no, the user-agent isn’t lies. It just changes the user-agent header – so it actually has nothing to do with how a page is rendered. (Yeah – Jools has just mentioned this…) Who cares about HTTP headers when you can write a nice jQuery plugin eh?

Safari 4’s nice, its ACID2/ACID3 compliancy is exciting, but I’ll stick with firefox. There’s no way that Firebug has any competition for the moment.

I really like the new Safari, but there’s a few thing I hate.

I’m used to the URL bar in Google Chrome. I like to have the location and search in one field.

Also I don’t like the height of the tabs on Windows XP. It’s like 35px I think.

But definitely great work!

Muy buen articulo.

*drool* I am really diggin the new features. I can’t wait to try it out for my own :]

Love the new Safari! Can’t wait for the final release.

still doesn’t beat the extendability of firefox, although it is pretty!

Seeing this article, I JUMPED TO GO DOWNLOAD THE SAFARI on my XP. I however can’t find the developer bar. I have gone to preferences and still can’t find it. AND OF COURSE THAT’S WHAT I NEED!

Sorry! I just found it!

The ICC Color Profile Support is broken in the Windows version. I don’t understand why given Safari was the first browser to support this feature. It would be nice to have other options other than FF3. Boo to Apple for failing to support this feature under Windows.

I wish it was a browser emulator so I don’t have to download parallels, partition my HD, make a virtual computer, or buy PC computer just to test my sites in other browsers like IE not supported by Mac. I just wish all browsers were created the same. Or for Microsoft to just forcefully get rid of IE6. Just send out an update script that auto updates to at least IE7. That would be smart. Just bomb IE6 for all it is worth. Which isn’t much.
I still will stick with Firefox. I did get a little excited about the developer tool bar user-agent. Unfortunately after being told I am wrong, I now understand. Thank you all for clearing this up for me. I was unaware. I thought maybe someone had actually developed and figured out how to actually cause a browser to render all major browsers for development purposes into one browser. Making our lives much easier in the CSS world. Unfortunately I was wrong. Some day I hope. Some day. Mainly because whoever does will become a king of browsers and make lots of money.

Oh man, thanks God,

Firefox is just too ugly to be useful…

@Carlos: “I just wish all browsers were created the same.”

You can thank Microsoft for things not being that way. We have standards, and most of the browsers follow them, at least close enough to not have major issues. It’s IE that’s really broken.

Wow, how incredible. The fact that you can select multiple user agents will save a lot of time and money for me. No more booting up VMWare to test in IE6. What a great job by Apple.

… and you must now can’t use your hotmail.

You forgot to mentions some features: Gmail no longer works… And there are issues with Hotmail.

Personally, I also feel that Apple should add a preference to allow users to put the tabs below the address bar. I don’t like the Chrome inspiration.

Yeah, but can you disable Anti-Aliasing in the windows version yet?

i like Safari 4 so far.

But I fail to see what the snippet editor is possibly good for. Anyone?

If you set your homepage to “topsites://” it will launch your topsites on launch. I find that to be really handy because I use it as a springboard to my favorite places.

@redwall_hp

“You can thank Microsoft for things not being that way. We have standards, and most of the browsers follow them, at least close enough to not have major issues. It’s IE that’s really broken.”

Here here!! So true.

For you hack-inclined users, there’s a way to get more control of your Top Sites by editing a .plist file. http://www.mactropolis.com/how-tos/how-to-edit-safari-4-beta-top-sites/

Oh yeah

I can tell you it’s good. I’m being enjoy more the Apple…

Yeah, it’s BETA and has some bugs, but I hope it will be repaired ^^

Well, I loved Safari 4 Beta!

And good article!

it’s wicked fast. but I can’t figure out how to add a URL to Google Bookmars (no extension, no bookmarklet). And I can’t use Roboform with it to fill in passwords. Until Safari supports and has a following of extensions FireFox is still the top dog.