Safari is a good browser. No, Safari is a GREAT browser. I use it exclusively and have for about 3 years.  For me, it beats Firefox hands down.  Safari 3 was fast and efficient and, from what I can see after today’s release, Safari 4 is even faster.  It’s got a nice streamlined look, with unessential items moved or minimized, and it has a zippy feel to it. It loads in a heartbeat, and browsing is a pleasure. That being said, here are my main problems:

1. The Bookmark folders still don’t roll.

Amazingly, you still can’t “roll through” your bookmark folders located on Safari’s bookmarks bar (below the URL).  This is the behavior that, for example, Firefox has had since version 1, where if you have a bookmark folder dropped down, then you can roll through to other folders without having to reselect the folder to close it and then select the next folder.  Every time Safari launches a major update, this is the first thing I check. I checked it when 3 came out, I checked it when 4 came out, and I’m almost positive I’ll check it again for versions 5, 6, and 7 and probably be equally disappointed. This has almost become a kind of crusade for me, but I can’t seem to figure out what to do about it.  The odd thing is that every other menu in OSX has this roll-through feature.

You still can't roll through this menu

2. Great, more things to erase when I Google sensitive material

Top Sites: This allows Safari to choose which sites you visit most and give you a slow-loading thumbnail for all the sites in a curved layout thingie that you are almost surely never to use unless you can’t actually read text. But holy crap it looks good though.  Opera has this Speed Dial function and I’ve seen it on other browsers as well, but usually it’s exclusively user-controlled. I don’t see why it should replace the old Apple-1, Apple-2 etc. to go to your numbered favorites and I’m not sure I see the point in having Safari pick your favorites. I opened the Top Sites window and watched the thumbnails dance around for a bit. Some of the sites were places I hadn’t visited in a few weeks, and some I haven’t visited ever. But mostly there were the usual pages: NYTimes, Flickr, Ebay etc. I’m assuming that this is because Safari has begun picking my favorites from the time I installed Safari 4, and that these are just place holders.

3. The cover flow black hole.

There is now Cover Flow view for your Bookmarks. This is a nice feature except for the fact that most pages don’t seem to have a thumbnail. I am not sure if this applies to pages that have been bookmarked before Safari 4′s installation, or what. I can’t seem to find any pattern for which ones have thumbnails and which ones don’t.  In some cases, there’ll be two pages from the same site, one with a thumbnail and one without.

The Cover Flow black hole.

4. The non-progress Bar.

Safari 3′s progress bar used to be a blue bar that would overlap the URL and show you how much of a page was loaded. This has been replaced by a tiny grey bar and a wheel that don’t indicate any progress, they just tell you that a page is loading. It’s much better looking than the blue bar, but less informative.  Maybe Apple felt like people were relating the blue progress bar to slow page loading times.  I’ll admit that the new bar gives the illusion of speed, since the progress is hidden from the user, but I can envision times when I’ll miss the old progress bar, such as when uploading movies to Facebook.

5. YES I’M SURE!

The “are you sure” disease began to rear its head in the later versions of Safari 3.  If you want to close a page that has a form submit window, Safari will ask you if you are sure.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like you are able to disable this. You are, however, allowed to disable the “close multiple tabs” nag window.  I don’t understand this inconsistency.

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The bottom line is: Safari 4 is a great browser and I applaud Apple for streamlining and simplifying what was already a super-efficient application.  However, odd decisions, inconsistencies, and high CPU usage continue to scar what could otherwise be a perfect browser.

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