The Safari 4 web browser has been officially launched and can be downloaded through your Mac’s Software Updates. The Safari 4 release also fixed one important bug that affected me enough that I gave up on the beta and downgraded back to Safari 3: yes, the various user interface bugs with Safari 4 beta and WordPress / TinyMCE has finally been squashed.
Safari 4 is an important upgrade because of several key improvements. I’m quite picky about standards compliance, and it being the only mainstream web browser to fully pass the W3 ACID3 tests with a 100/100 score is very significant to me. I think any serious web developer would appreciate working with a web browser that is standards compliant.
In terms of performance, Safari 4 is reputed to be the leader of the pack in Javascript execution speed with its new Nitro Javascript engine. That’s also something very important considering that the web is now quite dependent on plenty of client side processing capabilities.
A slightly disappointing development to me is that the browser tabs, which used to appear in the title bar like in Google’s Chrome browser, has been removed and the tabs are now in their more conventional location inside the browser window. I like the tabs in the title bar. It saves screen real estate and doesn’t change the internal browser window size when I add tabs to an existing single-tab window.
Funnily, a quick Google search revealed that many people are trying to get back the conventional behaviour in their Safari 4 beta browser.
Help, I want the tabs in my title bar! The hidden preferences to disable it Safari 4 beta doesn’t seem to work to enable it in the final Safari 4 release.
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