Basics4Mac - First Look: Safari 4

Faster than a speeding bullet

Top Sites in Safari 4
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On June 8, 2009, Apple released Safari 4. It is available from Software Update. (To find Software Update, look under the Apple menu.)

The first thing you will see with Safari 4 is a new place called Top Sites. Top Sites shows a thumbnail of the twelve sites you visit the most often. You can click on a thumbnail and go directly to that page.

Also in Top Sites is a History search field where you can search your History. You can not only search URLs and page titles as in Safari 3, but the entire contents of the webpages in your History.

But by far the most dramatic change I have found in Safari 4 is page load speed. And I mean really fast speed. Some pages updated so quickly that if I blinked I missed the loading. At first I thought that maybe Safari 4 had cached the pages that I visit often so I went to sites I don't visit often. Same speed.

And here I've been complaining for months about the slow speed of my DSL connection!

It seemed that the speed increase had to be a fluke, so I set up my MacBook with Safari 4 and iMac with Safari 3 in a shootout. Time after time, test after test, Safari 4 blew away the page load speed of Safari 3.

For the most part, the interface of Safari 4 will feel very familiar to you. There are a few changes here and there, but probably nothing you can't figure out.

Stay tunes for some Basics4Mac tips on Safari 4 coming soon.