Wow. I was just reading up on what’s packed in to the new Safari Beta (v4).
Not only does it have the usual “it’s now the fastest browser” stuff, because they all leap frog each other with speed anyway, but some impressive “net new” capabilities:
- Dramatic UI improvements like cover flow and something kind of Expose-like for browsing your top sites and history
- CSS effects and animation – I wonder what this will do to some of the Javascript libraries out there? Allow them to trim this stuff out? Only once the other browsers catch up of course…
- Live fonts – so you can specify the fonts for a page and if the machine doesn’t have them installed, it’ll go get them automatically. No more being limited to the handful of “web-safe” fonts.
- And for the developer: a SQL browser for the local offline database, that actually lets you run queries against it through the UI… and some pretty advanced performance optimization tools & debuggers!
What really excites me, because I’m not personally surprised at what Apple has come up with (I have a lot of faith in their ability to raise the bar) is that it’s not just Safari on Macs that will reap the benefits of this next wave of enhancements. It’s the iPhone, Safari on Windows (which will likely receive a boost in adoption as they are going with native Windows chrome now to make the Windows users feel more at home) and Google’s Chrome, which is coming on strong and is based on the same rendering engine as Safari.
I feel like it really is the golden age of Web development. The browser really has become a professional run-time environment. Finally!
Live Fonts have been in Firefox and IE for a while, so it’s nice to see Safari catch up.
Standards-based CSS Effects and Animation are also cool, I don’t see it being used in sites much initially. But since WebKit can be embedded in other devices, I can see those features being used in embedded apps or in situations where you can control what browser people use.
Top Sites looks cool, I’ve switched to Chrome recently and I use their top pages feature all the time. It’s a lot faster than loading multiple home pages.
The Cover Flow effect through your history looks interesting, particularly because I just watched a video tutorial about carousels, in which they state that cover flow shouldn’t be used in the way Apple is using it in the history.
This is because the benefit of Cover Flow is being able to see the difference in pictures. While this works very well with album covers or your photo collection, it can be less useful with web pages or documents because these media are harder to scan through quickly.