Headlining Apple's feature list is Top Sites, a display of thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites?perhaps more well known as the "Most Recent" home screen in Google's Chrome browser and Opera's Speed Dial (Microsoft also has a version in betas of IE8).
Under Safari's hood, Apple claims that a new Nitro engine runs JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE7, and three times faster than Firefox 3. These comparisons should get more interesting in the near future, though, as Mozilla isn't exactly lying down on the JavaScript job with an upcoming Firefox 3.1 release.
Apple's increasingly popular WebKit rendering engine now supports HTML 5 with offline storage, providing the groundwork for a new generation of Web apps like Gmail to work without an Internet connection. Expanded CSS 3 support is also present, supporting reflections, gradients, and precision masks on websites. Apple also brags that Safari 4 beta is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid3 rendering test.
Apple added a number of other lesser features and enhancements to Safari 4 beta, such as a Smart Address Field that suggests and labels URLs from history, bookmarks, and Top Sites. Safari's Google search field now provides suggestions from Google Suggest, though this search box is hard-coded to Google and cannot be customized. Various plug-ins are available for bringing more choices to Safari's search, but we would still like to see Apple?which brags so often about openness and Web standards in its browser?provide search options natively.
Apple appears to have created a new UI problem for each new feature it introduced, and at least one staff member has already uninstalled Safari 4 beta because of the aforementioned broken plug-in and bookmarklet problems (however, most bookmarklets, including popups, worked fine in our other testing).
Performance is noticeably faster on large, rich media sites like CNN.com, and even resource management seems to have improved. Safari drops to consuming almost none of our CPU resources when idling on a couple of static pages (finally), and its RAM cache actually diminishes a little when closing tabs.
The new tabs UI is an interesting change, but it could definitely use some refinement on both Mac OS X and Vista. While the Top Sites and Cover Flow features initially seemed a bit over the top, they could theoretically be useful for quickly picking out sites. Safari certainly still lacks some key features, most notably an official support for plug-ins support (ahem), but Apple makes up for some of it with a solid and increasingly popular rendering engine and good Mac OS X integration.
Facebook
Twitter