Safari 3.0 for Mac users

Steve made history again on June 11, announcing during his WWDC 2007 Keynote Address that Safari, Apple’s web browser, is now available for Windows. There have been only a handful of Macintosh applications made available for Windows in the past, with iTunes and QuickTime Player being the most visible of the bunch, so this is big news. Now Windows users can enjoy features like integrated RSS and the WebKit rendering engine, things that, until now, they could not get from Internet Explorer.

But, what about us, the enlightened few who use Macs? Along with the public beta of Safari for Windows, Apple released a beta of Safari 3.0 for Mac OS X. What are the new features therein and are they worth downloading and upgrading to a beta release?

Well, first things first: the installer comes complete with an uninstaller. So, while the installation writes over your previous version of Safari and requires a restart, you can roll back to Safari v2 if you don’t like the beta. But, what’s not to like?

The new version of Safari includes:

A faster downloading experience. According to Apple.com, Safari v3b loads pages more than twice as fast as Firefox v2 and more than 4 times faster than Opera. I can’t figure out how to test that on my own, but I assume that it’s true at least some of the time. More speed is good, right?

In-line search. This one is awesome. When you hit cmd-F to find something on a webpage, a bar drops down from the Bookmarks Bar that looks a lot like the search field in Mail. As you type, the results are high-lighted on the webpage and little arrows take you from one result to the next. Firefox has had this for a while and the implementation in Safari is fantastic.

Drag and Drop Tabs. Another winner here. In Safari v3b, tabs can be moved, re-positioned and dragged out into their own window. You can also drag a URL or favicon to the tab bar, but I think you could do that before.

In-line PDF Controls. Via a new contextual menu, you can control PDF viewing in new ways that are powerful enough to make an external reader obsolete.

Resizeable text fields. This one is really cool - every large text field you encounter, on forms, contact pages, message boards, etc, has a draggable corner and is resizeable.

Spellcheck. I am honestly not sure if this one is new or not, but real-time spellcheck is built-in to Safari v3b.

Google Docs works. Here at MacApper, we use GoogleDocs for our writing and, aggravatingly, Google did not support Safari, so I had to use Firefox for my writing. Now, despite an easy-to-dismiss warning that says otherwise, GDocs works fine in Safari - I’m writing this post in Safari right now.

I am sure that there are other features new to v3b. Once we move to Leopard, there will be others (like web clips) but I am sure that there are some more I haven’t found yet. Even so, I think that the above list demonstrates that the new beta is worth a try, even for Mac users. Give it a go and let us know in comments what cool, new features I may have missed.

If you have missed the bandwagon and haven’t had a chance to download Safari Beta 3 yet, pick it up for free from Apple.