Safari 4 browser showdown

Posted by Al Warmington on Wed 25 Feb 2009

Safari vs Internet Explorer vs Firefox vs Chrome

This week, Apple rolled out the public beta of its new Safari 4 web browser. Faced with the stiff competition in the browser market, Safari 4 came out swinging – promising faster loading times, a polished interface and a handful of new tweaks to make your browsing experience swifter and more aesthetically pleasing.

However, taking on Google’s innovative Chrome browser, which took us by a very pleasant surprise when it dropped into open beta back in September, the lovey-dovey open sourciness of Firefox and the lumbering behemoth of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, is no mean feat – so how does Safari 4 compare?

We’ll start with probably the most important factor – the speed. Now, you might be thinking that there’s not a hell of a lot a browser can do to speed up your surfing, given that it’s mostly down to your internet connection speed rather than your software. And that’s true to an extent, but Safari 4 boasts a new Nitro JavaScript Engine designed to make browsing faster. Apple proudly claims that it can execute JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.

From a practical standpoint, however, the time differences aren’t overwhelmingly noticeable in all cases. If you’re comparing to IE7, then yes, you’ll notice that Safari 4 isn’t dicking about doing whatever the hell it is that IE7 does in the hours it takes to load up. But when you’re comparing a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds, you’d be hard pushed to argue that you’ll really be saving yourself much hassle in the long run. However, it’s certainly fair to say that Safari 4 launches like hot shit off a shovel. And once you’re online, it doesn’t dither either.

Various benchmarks put its speed ahead of former speed-king, Chrome, although here the differences are so minute as to be almost unnoticeable to the human brain. But credit where credit is due – Safari 4 can proudly take its new top spot, for as long as it takes one of the others to shave another couple of milliseconds off the new record.

What Safari 4 lacks over Chrome is the way Google’s browser runs different tabs as separate processes. While this can impact on system performance (you won’t notice it on even a half-decent machine), it ensures that if a web page or plug-in crashes, it doesn’t take down the whole browser with it. Safari 4 sticks to the old school method of running things, leaving itself open to this admittedly small vulnerability.

In the grand tradition of browser warfare, Safari 4 has also liberally borrowed ideas from its competitors. It has pinched both Firefox’s Awesome Bar and Chrome’s Most Visited page, adding its own improvements to each. The Awesome bar has become the Smart Address Field. When you start typing in the address bar, the browser automatically searches through your recent history and bookmarks to make suggestions for what you might be looking for.

Chrome also shared a similar function, but – presumably because of its Google leanings – it threw Google searches into the mix. Arguably, that’s the more efficient way of doing things, but it was a bit of a confusing transition for hardened Firefox vets who are used to hitting Ctr+T, Tab to get to a search bar. Safari 4 pleasantly includes a search bar on the right-hand side as well, and it too offers smart suggestions for what you may be searching for, as well as more recent searches. Score another one for Safari 4.

The most eye-catching upgrade is the new Top Sites feature, which fires up whenever you open a new tab. It’s roughly the same deal as Chrome’s Most Visited page or Opera’s Speed Dial, but presented in a much more pleasant looking manner.

Each of your most recent and regularly viewed sites are displayed in a polished curving arrangement against a black back-drop, and you’ve got a number of options for tweaking the layout and positioning of each. The history viewer also shares some of this aesthetic design, using Cover Flow – the same as is now used by iTunes – to give you a row of snapshots to scroll through. It looks good and it’s a lot easier to find your way through than a basic list of page headers.

Internet Explorer is beaten hands down by both Firefox and Chrome at almost every turn anyway, but Apple obviously felt that it needed an extra kicking this time around. Safari 4 for Windows boasts a ‘native Windows’ look, which apes the title bars, borders and layout of other Windows applications.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, we’ll grant you – last time we checked, Apple OS X was no ugly duckling – but one that will help Vista users feel especially at home, and given Apple’s controversial decision to start peddling its browser wares as part of the iTunes automatic update, it could help the company lure in and retain more Safari users.

But for all the positives, there are some negatives. Our biggest gripe is with the tab bar – now repositioned above the address bar. It’s not the position that irks us, but the appalling font and background colour that renders page titles almost unreadable. Furthermore, it can only accept a handful of tabs before shunting any extra ones off the page, only to be accessible by clicking the Show all tabs portion of the tab bar.

As people who can have quite absurd numbers of open tabs and windows at any one time, being forced to trawl through a drop-down list is a complete deal breaker, but admittedly it may not affect the average surfer too badly. We’re also disappointed to find that there’s no means of storing your open tabs (other than by bookmarking) when you close Safari 4 down, which again proves to be a bit of a let down for web addict. Hopefully these gripes (especially the font issue) could be ironed out in time for the proper launch.

All in all, Safari 4 offers a number of impressive improvements on the browsing experience; it’s fast, it looks good and it borrows just enough inspiration from the competition to complement its own new ideas. It probably won’t be enough to convert Firefox and Chrome fans, but if you’re making the mistake of continuing to use Internet Explorer, we’d heartily recommend you take a look.

Link: Safari 4 Beta