Safari 4 Beta

Web Browsing for Ballers.

Granted, I dislike Apple. But, as a human being, I can overcome full-blown hatred and hate just a small section of certain things. Like, for instance, I don't hate Vitamin Water, but I do hate that shitty yellow citrus Vitamin Water. I absolutely despise iPods and iTunes, and as such, I'm a little bitter towards the company as a whole.

But when it comes to making an OS, Apple is king. I've been wanting to mess with the Macintosh OS for quite some time, but I've never had an opportunity. Because of this, I felt it was necessary to download the new Safari 4 beta for Windows. Unfortunately, I use Vista, and I missed out on upgrading to the Windows 7 Beta, which I wouldn't mind upgrading to come August time, when I hope it's released.

Now, Safari 4 has a top sites screen, as the image above shows. What this is, essentially, is a list of your most frequented web sites, plastered and displayed elegantly before you in a large, easy to read shortcut list. You can choose from a small, medium, or large size, and with such you can have more of your frequented sites, or less. Problem is, I'm often times going to myspace, and then being redirected to myspace or some bullshit, so I have several windows of the same website. So, instead of using the top sites as a bookmarking tool, it's just like that little tab over in Mozilla that I use to navigate forums to find a topic I was just recently at. All in all, this feature looks gorgeous and is very easy to use, but whenever it comes down to it, I just can't find the customization options I'm looking for, and as such several of the boxes are wasted with the repetition of the same website.

When checking your history, you have a nice iTunes like album-display interface, only instead of album art you have websites. I hate iTunes, so I don't think I will ever use this. An annoyance for me was how you couldn't navigate through your history using the arrow keys, and instead had to click the icons. Not a bit deal, but it's something I expected to happen.

Apple claims that Safari 4 is the fastest browser, and thus far I can't really disagree. It is relatively quick, and between Mozilla and Safari, I can tell a minimal difference in speed, with Safari probably edging ahead. Still, that's with several add-ons I have for Firefox, which Safari doesn't offer.

When it comes down to it, I very much enjoy Safari 4, but it's still just a beta, and as such I've had several problems displaying websites and frequent crashes (only lately, though) dealing with their support for Flash. Still, Safari was the new and exciting browser I was looking for, and I can see myself using it in the future for several things. Besides, it looks sleek enough to where I don't have to maximize it, and I just leave it centered along my desktop without distorting the page at all.

I'll probably continue to use it from time to time, but Firefox is and always will be my primary choice of browser. Still, it's all opinion, and I can't really argue and say that Apple hasn't done a good job here.