Safari 4 - Fast or just Flashy?

A browser’s main purpose is to take you to the internet. Different plugins such as radio, uploaders, dictionary and others were introduced by Firefox made it quite popular aside from being a fast internet browser. However, competitors are always around such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

It has been days since Safari 4 made its beta debut. I have tried it from the day it went out due to its promise of giving a much faster internet experience than any browser available. Apple said that this is due to Safari’s Nitro javaScript engine that makes it render webpages easily and lightning fast. Being a speed freak, this caught my attention and made me download Safari 4 immediately.

Things that users immediately see upon running Safari is the Top Sites menu which is like the speed dial on Opera and that the tabs are located at the top of the window. Being a long time Firefox user, closing a tab by clicking the X button is something that is automatically done by my fingers, but doing it in Safari is having to relearn that the X button is at the left of the tab. The interface is also nice and clean just like iTunes and as what can be expected from Apple.

As far as speed is concerned, indeed Safari is fast. I haven’t gone into testing it by milliseconds but there is a slight noticeable difference. For existing Firefox 3 users, the speed change isn’t really that much but having it compared against IE 7, it is like the Jetsons against Flintstones. The coverflow view really looks nice but it takes time too. I prefer the regular text view since it is faster.

A major drawback of the UI improvements done on Safari is its memory consumption. A tab opened in Safari is like having 5 tabs open in Firefox in my computer ( I am using Windows by the way). Also, I noticed that while Safari is opened, there is a slowdown in operation of my other applications like when switching from Word to Safari or iTunes to Word and the like.

Safari 4 isn’t just window dressing Safari 3 as can be seen by the improvements in real usage performance. I guess Apple based their tests with Core 2 Duo machines or equivalent processors so people with older computers will have some issues in addition to its being a memory hog.

The browser sure is something to try (if you still haven’t, it’s free anyway) but couldn’t be a real replacement for people who depend on Firefox’ extensions for their daily internet browsing. After all, Safari 4 is still in its Beta stage and things will still change as the final product is released.