News 

On the outside, Safari 4 is little different to February’s beta release, which introduced new features such as Top Sites, Cover Flow browsing of history and bookmarks and smarter search and form filling.

Once obvious change is the tab bar reverting to its traditional position and a new-look though functionally unchanged loading indicator.

It us under the hood, however, that Apple has made the most significant change, though it will only come into effect once Macs

ADVERTISEMENT

are running Snow Leopard. Noting that most if not all browser crashes are caused by plugins, of which Flash is the most widely used, Apple has tweaked Safari so that plugins will run as a separate process in Snow Leopard. As a result, if a plugin crashes, it will no longer take the whole browser down with it.

“The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari is enjoyed by 70 million users worldwide and with its blazing fast speed, innovative features and support for modern web standards, it’s the best browser on any platform.”

Schiller added that Safari’s new Nitro engine executes JavaScript nearly four times faster than Firefox 3, while the browser loads plain old HTML web pages more than three times faster.

Safari 4 is available now from apple.com/safari or via Software Update.