Safari 4 storms out the gates
Safari 4 has logged 11 million downloads in its first four days of availability, according to Apple.
The company said that since the browser was first unveiled Monday at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, downloads have been steady for both the Mac and PC versions.
“Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days,” said Apple senior vice president of product marketing Philip Schiller.
“Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow.”
Of the 11 million downloads, roughly six million have been from Windows users, while the remaining 5 million have been for MacOS X systems. Originally released as a Mac-only browser, the company first made Safari available to Windows users at the 2007 Worldwide Developer Conference.
Safari 4, A Browser Equipped for the Web App Jungle, Arrives
The next version of Apple’s web browser has hit the open waters. The company announced the final version of Safari 4 will be available for download Monday afternoon for Mac OS X and Windows from Apple’s website. The browser will also ship with Snow Leopard, the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X desktop operating system, due in September.
The emphasis with this release is raw speed. Safari 4 features an updated page rendering engine and a revamped JavaScript engine that improves the performance of the latest web apps and supports the newest web standards.
Browsing history searches have been enhanced with a new feature that lets you flip through previously viewed web pages in Cover Flow mode — you can view your browser history in the same way you view album cover art in iTunes. Spotlight search has been integrated into the browser, too, so you can search the text within recently-viewed web pages using the system-wide search tool borrowed from Mac OS X.
Safari 4 also includes a crash protection mechanism that keeps the browser running, even if a plug-in like Flash player crashes.
Full Story: Web Monkey
Safari 4’s Messy Trail
Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that’s a privacy nightmare.
Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you’ve visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn’t know was kept about you.” Some of Safari’s bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.
