How do you feel about Safari 4 so far?

Well i have a mixed review/. The new features are great, the look of it is amazing, the interface in intuitive, basically it’s everything i ever wanted firefox to be without having to download 3rd party software… the one thing that made me uninstall and revert to 3 is that i depend heavily on msn messenger… and for some reason after having installed 4 i started having continuity problems in my conversation flows… if i started up a conversation the cursor would automatically appear in the dialog box as always…. once having sent the message however…. i had to go back and click to reactivate the cursor every time in order to be able to continue typing…. the second i went back to 3 the problem was fixed. So i guess what i’m saying is I LOVE 4… but i’m going to wait until they fix a couple of bugs before i reinstall and make it my default browser…. till then… firefox all the way.

Some good info if you use it.

I’m liking it. But I doubt I will switch from Firefox.

i am on it right now and i really like it a lot

I really like it. That “Topsites” feature is awesome – it even shows which pages have changed since your last visit – brilliant! Not sure about the top tabs yet, but it seems good. The speed is amazing. I haven’t had any issues so far.

So fast! Both in rendering and usage (the new GUI makes everything quicker)

I’m sticking with the ‘fox. The “top sites” is better than an about:blank homepage, but the Speeddial add-on (Firefox) lets you do the same, and also select what the thumbnail is of. This is great because I never need to load twitter: I can see the newest 10 tweets from the thumbnail. Similarly, I have one thumbnail with the most important part of the weather forecast.

Tabs up top are sexy, though. Chrome beats out Safari in a lot of ways, however: faster java rendering (the fastest web browser ever? really?), threaded processes, sexier. Firefox outclasses it with add-ons, and what I believe to be the best address bar in any browser due to search keywords. It blows Chrome’s integrated search out of the water.

I’ve already made it my default browser on my Windows machine and likely will on my Mac when I get home too. Firefox is definitely better than IE on Windows but in my opinion it’s becoming too bloated. I really didn’t use that many add-ons either as most of them seemed relatively pointless to me. shrug

@tonedef re:“fastest browser ever. Really?” – independent tests have proven Safari 4 is significantly faster than any other browser. I believe it was about 45X faster than IE7 and 3.5X faster than FireFox. I’ll post the link when I get home, but I’m sure someone else will beat me to it.

I was getting my information from DownloadSquad, whose benchmarks show Chrome edging out Safari 4. There’s no question that it’s faster than IE or Firefox, though.

Here’s the article I was referring to. It quotes Safari 4 as “a whopping 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, just over six times faster than Internet Explorer 8, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 1.2 times faster than Google Chrome.”

Oh, also, now that I’ve been using it a bit, its obvious that the Developer Tools in Safari 4 – particularly the Web Inspector – have been dramatically improved. I do some web development and it is the only thing I’ve really used Firefox for in the past year. I’d say tentatively that Safari 4’s Dev Tools has put an end to that as I can see no benefit to using FF over Safari 4 at this time.

Also, Lifehacker just posted their speed test results, and those coincide with Download Squad’s. If anything, this makes Apple’s claim suspect. But then again, the company that sells “the funnest iPod ever” does tend to get enthusiastic when using superlatives.

Ha. So they do, tonedef.

Also, remember that this just the beta; the full deal is yet to come.

The CNET article Ilinked is completely independent and they are usually quite negative about anything Apple anyway, so I wouldn’t discount it so quick.

Regardless, there are a lot of things a lot more important than speed anyway (unless your talking about IE—I mean seriously)

From a web designer standpoint, safari 4’s develop menu is amazing. That being said, I believe I’ll run safari and firefox while building a site.

Do differentiate between Firefox 3 and soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.1 when it comes to speed :)

it’s my backup browser (chrome’s my main). i find chrome and safari to be about equally fast (and found opera to be blazing scary fast). firefox bloat: my macbook can’t even run 3.5 (and it’s fairly new, running leopard). i actually had to reinstall my os. firefox just made an eternal beachball somehow, i couldn’t run anything till i took it off my machine. tried twice (only had to reinstall once, tho. whew!).

safari 4 works OK for me, tho.