Safari 4 Public Beta

Science | Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:43:52 pm PST

There’s a treat at the Apple website: Apple Releases Beta of Safari 4.

Here’s a direct link to the download page.

First geeked-out impressions: the Javascript engine is screaming fast. Pages with a lot of Javascript are much quicker. LGF seems to work just dandy, and I haven’t encountered any rendering problems on any other websites yet.

And the new Top Sites feature will be useful — but it would be more useful if you could choose which sites were displayed.

UPDATE at 2/25/09 1:15:10 pm:

CNET UK has run the numbers, and Safari 4 is now the fastest browser on the planet: Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3. (Hat tip: Izzy Dunne.)

UPDATE at 2/25/09 1:21:19 pm:

Just noticed something — accesskeys don’t work?