I gave up on Safari yonks ago on my Mac and I’ve been a bit of a Firefox bitch for years, although I’ve heard good things about the Safari 4 Beta which came out the other day. It’s hardly going to ride roughshod over an installation I already use so I thought I’d give it a go.

Installation nice and smooth, although really why did I need to reboot? Am I running Windows on this thing? No. There is no need. Come on, Apple – stop being daft.

Truthful verdict on the app itself? It’s quite nifty. Blindingly fast on my Macbook, at least in comparison to Firefox; the really very fast Javascript engine will help a lot with my $dayjob work on webapps too. Rendering seems OK but I’ve not tried to do any of the more interesting stuff yet (book hotel rooms, upload content, all that foo).

One big annoyance – the positioning of the tabs right at the top. Thanks to Hitch, this can be sorted on the command line with:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

…which will shift them back below the location bar after an app restart. More undocumented UI fiddles here.

One minor annoyance – because of the preinstalled RSS feeds, it fills your “popular sites” shizzle with CNet, Youtube, Amazon et al. Easily sorted tho.

So far so good – I’ll try it in preference to Firefox for a few days (although probably longer if I can find a way of importing my stored security stuff, bookmarks, and stuff).