Wouldn’t you know it? Just as I publish my article comparing Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, Apple goes and annouces the public beta of Safari 4. They claim the new Safari is the fastest browser of them all, destroying IE, beating Firefox, and inching ahead of Chrome both in HTML rendering and Javascript. While it is definitely fast, in my totally bogus speed tests (go to a URL and see how many seconds it takes on my stopwatch), it doesn’t seem that much faster than Firefox or Chrome, if at all. In fact, the new Safari is very Chrome-like, with tabs on top, the same webkit rendering engine, and menus in the same places. Still, they’ve added eye candy in the form of “Top Sites” which is essentially Chrome’s start up page but prettier, and cover flow for browsing history, and the windows versions now use standard Windows fonts.
Maybe at some point soon, I’ll do another browser faceoff article, but this time comparing Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.1, Safari 4, and hopefully an updated Google Chrome.
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