wow. big question: what hot new features will they build in to woo away die-hard firefox converts such as myself?
Never mind. I went and found out for myself. It's a different animal from WebKit, apparently. Installing it requires a reboot afterwards, which means there are fundamental tweaks to the system (then again this one is meant to ship with Snow Leopard, so I guess there are some substantial alterations to be made.) Not to worry, the installer comes conveniently with an uninstall package. Webkit is just a superficially improved Safari 3. This one is much better. I can imagine how even better it would run under the new OS. It's wicked-fast (my acidtest comes up 100/100 everytime) and its pages look somehow ...neater and clearer? As a Firefox diehard it's a pleasant change, however subtle (or subjective). Having tinkered for only an hour, I haven't seen a lot of changes yet, save for the fact that you can change what pages show up when you open new windows or new tabs, and that you can save pages as stand-alone, browser-independent web apps, a lot like the app Fluid does. Here's what our beloved user group looks like as a web application saved under Safari 4.0: I have a couple of gripes though: they still haven't included a New Tab button under prefs, and no easy way not to switch to the new tab if you command-click on a link. BTW, the installer DMG is a little over 27MB and there are Preview 2 versions specific for Leopard, Tiger and Windows. More later.
