Safari 4

Today Apple released a public beta of Safari 4. It has some impressive new features, but what really caught my eye was the new Cover Flow view for browser history. Currently I use SafariStand to get this feature under Safari 3, and I’ve come to rely on it heavily. I’m extremely glad to see it’s going to be built right in to Safari 4.

Safari 4 Beta is available for both Mac and PC. As with all software, you should understand what the word, “Beta” means if you plan on installing it.

UPDATE: After seeing this post over at Daring Fireball, I thought it worth mentioning that you’ll want to be especially cautious upgrading to Safari 4 Beta if you use any Input Managers, such as the excellent 1Password. It’s important to remember that these things are unsupported hacks, and it’s entirely possible for new versions of Safari to break these “plugins”. Don’t upgrade yet if there’s any third party add-ons that you absolutely rely on.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to this post at The Graphic Mac, I’ve learned that Safari 4 now stores bookmarks in a .plist file, rather than a standard HTML file, like previous versions of Safari. Unfortunately, this probably means that most bookmark syncing utilities will probably be broken as well.

UPDATE #3 (2/25/2009): Just 1 day after Apple released Safari 4 Beta, Agile Web Solutions has updated 1Password to be compatible (and include several other bug fixes). Awesome!