Safari 4 beta announced

[Drewbert]

http://www.apple.com/safari/

feature list http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html

[mdw]

Safari always was the best example of CSS support. Ever since webkit came along this has been the reference implementation for javascript as well, stealing that crown from firefox. But with v4 safari is also seriously faster than the others, including Chrome/Win! Chrome team has been working on a Mac version for some time now, but never seem to get it out the door. Now they've lost the lead, as Safari has implemented most of those innovations already in Safari 4, for Mac and Windows (sorry ubuntu fans)

If you look into the details the Safari story gets even better. Apple got that huge speed without adopting the multi-process architecture that Google used to get their speedy performance. That approach has some real performance problems with certain types of Ajax-heavy web apps.

Meanwhile Opera continues to do nothing interesting, they haven't for a long time now. They seem to be content with a pretty solid Opera-mini, and content to retain their desktop market share through litigation. And IE permanently occupies the position of lowest common denominator, preventing developers from being able to take advantage of the new and cool stuff (canvas? what's that) Firefox - well they're often my favorite, and I hope to see some increased risk-taking on their part this spring. I'm guessing we see new features around security or improved ways of handling DOM operations.

And Microsoft may auto-update an IDN-capable browser someday.

[mdw]

OK well that was yesterday. Today Google tries using publicity to get thet word out that the next iteration is considerably faster still than the current, very speedy one.
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-has-new-beta_17.html

Safari.latest still runs on Windows and Mac, AND they display unicode domain names correctly instead of showing the punycode. That really should be a showstopper around here.

[jose]

Safari.latest still runs on Windows and Mac, AND they display unicode domain names correctly instead of showing the punycode. That really should be a showstopper around here.

RIGHT! F FF. I might try it over Opera. :)