Fast Browsing with Aple Safari 4.0

Safari is now a serious browser for serious Windows users, and its position on Macs has been bolstered.Users of Safari 3 will be hard-pressed to not notice that the interface is completely new, with a look and feel much more in-line with the other major Webkit-based browser, Google Chrome. The browser launches with the menu bar, tab bar and status bar all hidden, presenting you with the location bar, bookmark bar and the slick Top Sites interface. Top Sites is essentially Opera's Speed Dial feature, presenting your most commonly-visited websites, with a Cover Flow-style skin. The black background, curvature and reflective window bottom make this the most professional-looking web browser around. A blue star and an upturned corner indicate that a site has been updated since your last visit to it. Tap the Edit button in the bottom left corner to remove a site or pin a site permanently to Top Sites.

Apple's big claim with Safari is that it's the fastest browser on the market, and they just might be right on that count. On an Intel Core Duo T400 ThinkPad, with 3GB of RAM and a 2.53GHz processor, we ran both Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript test and Mozilla's Dromaeo test on Firefox 3.5 Preview, Google Chrome 2 and Safari 4. Safari came out on top in Dromaeo by a long shot, but Chrome eked by in SunSpider.

Keeping in mind that although these tests are affected by background computer processes, your hardware, and other factors, Safari is definitely one of the fastest browsers out there. However, it still lacks extensions, and for many Firefox users that's enough to keep them from switching. Even Internet Explorer supports some form of extensibility with its Web Slices and Accelerators.

Safari is still a RAM-devouring beast, too. With two tabs open, one to Dromaeo and one to SunSpider, it was using a shocking amount of RAM — more than 500MB after running both tests. Google Chrome consumed about 75MB of RAM across the same two sites under the same circumstances, while Firefox required 120MB.

With about 8.5 per cent of the browser market, it's clear that Apple is positioning Safari as more than a developer's tool on Windows, and that its successes at building a faster JavaScript engine should be taken seriously even with its other drawbacks.