Apple today released Safari 4, the world’s fastest and most
innovative web browser. Available for Mac and Windows PCs and
introduced as a beta in February of this year, Safari 4 features the
Nitro engine which runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari
3.* Safari 4 makes browsing more intuitive and enjoyable with
innovative features, such as Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover
Flow, and support for modern web standards like HTML 5 and advanced
CSS Effects.
“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.”
Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies
including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript
nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster
than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three
times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.*
Starting with the development of the open source WebKit browser
engine, Apple has been leading the industry in defining and
implementing innovative web standards. Safari 4 includes HTML 5
support for offline technologies and support for advanced CSS
Effects, enabling an entirely new class of web applications that
feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 is the first browser
to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how
well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG standards that
are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.
Safari 4 includes Top Sites, for an incredible visual preview of
frequently visited and favorite pages; Full History Search, to search
through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently
viewed pages; and Cover Flow, to easily flip through web history or
bookmarks. Other innovative features include Smart Address Fields for
automatically completing web addresses from an easy to read list of
suggestions; Search Fields, to fine tune searches with
recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches; and
Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading
the quality of the site’s layout and text.
In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available later this year, Safari runs as a
64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript
engine by up to 50 percent.** Snow Leopard makes Safari more
resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so
even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user
simply has to reload the affected page.
Pricing & Availability
Safari 4 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free
download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac
OS X Leopard v10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.11 and Security Update
2009-002, a minimum 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any
Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and
built-in FireWire. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or
Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a
500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more
information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari.