Safari 4 Beta: Wow.

I have been using Safari 4 Beta for all of five minutes now and I’m about to explode because my brain simply can’t wrap itself around the speed and usability improvements that I’m seeing.

First, the speed: I use Google Reader a lot and it is noticeably snappier. A web app that I’m designing is also considerably more responsive as the JavaScript engine (“Nitro…” I liked SquirrelFish better…) is far faster than the last version.

Second, the usability: I don’t know if it’s because Apple buggered up the JavaScript engine to handle the “javascript:NewWindow” function or not, but the Canon USA website I found incredibly frustrating to use last night is now usable. Wow.

Also, that I can tell, Safari now handles self-signed certificates (and remembering to allow them) correctly. What a blessing that one is, especially as I am developing my web app on my own server with my self-signed certificate. Whew!

And the integration of lightning-fast (and I do mean lightning fast) Google suggestions into the search bar is absolutely outstanding.

Now, a gripe or two:

The blue progress bar that filled in across the URL bar as the page loaded was very nice, and I miss it.

The grid display of most popular sites is really cool, as is the Coverflow view. But why no keyboard navigation? And why is there no way to access these views in the… View menu, or with a keyboard shortcut? The only way I can find to get at them is with a click in the Bookmark Bar on the grid icon. That strikes me as oddly exclusive of keyboard users.

More later as I discover things…