I’ve spent almost a week with Safari 4 now and I thought I’d share my experiences:

History

I wrote about this already, but the combination of having a history search box on the Top Sites page, plus the inclusion of Cover Flow is fantastic.

Some said that Coverflow is eye candy, but I’ve experienced just the opposite. Many times this week I’ve thought about a post I saw earlier on some forum, searched for it in the history and then visually flipped to find the page. I’m a visual person and it works very, very effectively. I can recall what a page looked like much faster than what the title might have been.

Speed

Safari 4 is fast. Really fast. In fact, the only slowdowns I’ve noticed is when it is loading ads. There are some ad-blockers out there, but I’ve been running without them just to get the average user’s experience.

Things are very, very snappy.

Tabs on Top

I really don’t like this, so much so that I reverted to the older style.

The new UI might work for a small amount of tabs, but until they make changes, I’ll use the old format. I have even tried to stop using tabs altogether, just to see how I like that. I do not have any conclusions on that as of yet.

What I found scary is that some have suggested Apple may use this new user interface for all applications in Snow Leopard. It might be a way to ‘dock’ all documents of a certain application together into one window.

Ick.

However, if they spruce up the UI so it is less noisy, if they make it so the “land mine” controls, like the handles and close buttons don’t function in inactive tabs, then maybe it’ll be more useful. For now, all it does is reduce one useful title into a bunch of little useless titles.

Address Box List

The new address box matching list is fantastic. The popup list that shows when you start typing a URI now shows the “top hit” which is often just the root of the URI, for example, http://www.apple.com, vs. http://www.apple.com/discussions?p=1i191282928292982921822u22282.

Then you get a list of bookmark matches and history matches, both separated from each other visually. Nice!

Overall, it feels much less messy than before.

Top Sites

The new Top Sites page is interesting. I’m not really using the top sites themselves per se because I am an avid user of RSS via NetNewsWire. However, for non-RSS users, I can see this as a big boon. The updated page icon in the upper-right really stands out and lets you know some new content exists.

As I wrote earlier, the main reason I’ve left Top Sites as my default page is for the Search History box. Super, super nice.

Stability

Safari 4 has not crashed once. It’s been open nearly 24/7 and only gets quit when I log out.

RAM usage seems down too, but still a bit high, likely due to in-memory caches. However, memory does go down when you close a tab/window, so that is a step in the right direction.

Summary

Safari 4 is a keeper. I am very impressed, have had zero issues with it and it has improved my browsing experience.

Nice job, WebKit team!

This morning my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 came through! The lamp on my Mits DLP TV had died after two years of service so I needed all of my warranty paperwork.

I searched for “Mitsubishi” in Spotlight and bam! Top hit, the one document with all of my receipts, extended warranty paperwork, all nicely scanned and OCRed into one searchable document.

Then I had to send in a FAX of my receipt and well, that work was done already too! I just used Preview to drag out the receipt page into a new FAX PDF and like magic, I was done.

Love, love, love my ScanSnap!

Update: I forgot to mention that even though my TV is over a year out of warranty, Mitsubishi is replacing the lamp, one time only, for free. Very nice.

I’ve seen a number of reviews of Safari 4, but I have not seen any cover the importance of promoting history search to the Top Sites page.

Safari has had history search for awhile. To use it in Safari 3, you had to click the Bookmark button, then click History in the list on the left, then click in the search field. Now, history search is right on the Top Sites page, in the lower right corner.

Why is this cool? Because Safari is actually indexing the contents of pages for you. It is not just remembering the titles and URIs, but what was on a page as well. Thus, using history search, you can search for “drum” and if “drum” is part of a comment on a youtube page that talks about “Rock Band” in the tile, it’ll be found!

Agile Web Solutions has released a public beta of 1Password for Safari 4. Kudos on the quick work!

To get this release, open your 1Password Preferences, click on Updates and then check the “include Beta versions” checkbox. Click “Check Now” and install the beta 2.9.9.

Here is a list of hidden safari preferences.

Found this gem on MacRumors Forums:

Quit Safari, open Terminal and paste in:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop false

then press return and relaunch Safari. Your tabs will be back the way they were with Safari 3.

I love Apple, I really do. The recent beta release of Safari 4 has some really exciting features, such as faster javascript, a new Top Hits view and better history searching.

However, in an attempt to steal some thunder from Google’s Chrome, Apple moved the task bar from below the bookmarks bar and replaced the title bar with tabs.

Is this OK? It completely breaks every Apple Human Interface Guideline for window title bars. I understand one reason for doing this: To take a title bar that wasted space and make it more useful, while freeing up some space for browsing.

However, in the process, they replicated the Windows XP task bar. Take a look:

This was ok when the bar was just a tab bar. But now it is my title bar! I can no longer move my mouse into the title bar and drag. I have to be aware of X (close tab) controls. I have to be aware of handles that drag the tab, vs the window. The more tabs I add, the more of these controls I have to be aware of.

I might like this over time, but for now, I find it very disconcerting. I think Apple should, at the very least, make this one UI feature an option. In fact, I’d like:

• Tabs on Top
• Tabs below the title bar
• Tabs below the bookmark bar (Safari 3)

Or even better, let me drag the tab bar in the Customize Toolbar dialog to whatever location I want, even at the bottom of the window.

What do you think?