Unseen Geek

To install or not to install Safari 4 Beta…

Posted on 24. Feb, 2009 by John in Technology

Well, I got notification of the new Safari version 4 Beta this morning and decided to take the dive and install it on my 2.16 GHz 3 GB RAM Macbook Pro with 10.5.6 Leopard. It installed nicely (though it did need to reboot). Here are some REALLY EARLY things about it that I’ve noticed.

Pros

• The top sites thing is really slick. This was one of the major reasons I was using Firefox at the moment, because of the FastDial add on, which I admit is a must have add on for firefox.
• The speed of the browser is amazing. Bottom-line, even in Beta “it’s fast!”
• History search in cover flow view. Nice … and easy to search up stuff from the history.

Cons

• When using wordpress, if you go to enter a hyperlink in a new post a popup normally appears and the page behind it gets disabled. Well in Safari 4 Beta the ENTIRE page gets disabled and you need to close the tab. This needs to be remedied.
• Why can we not edit the top sites page ourselves and enter the urls we want there?
• Growl 1.1.4 in Leopard now causes Apple Mail to crash. For now I just disabled Growl and all seems to be well. Correction on this point… GrowlMail Notification plugin is what was crashing, not Growl 1.1.4.

Bottom line… I took the dive, but you may want to wait on installing Safari 4 Beta at the moment if your machine is your livelihood. Also check out my friend Jordan’s post about the beta version for Windows.