Super-fast Safari 4 Scores 11 Million Installs In Three Days

By Michele Masterson, CRN
June 12, 2009 11:06 AM ET

Just three days after Safari 4 was unveiled at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, the so-called "world's faster browser" has garnered a whopping 11 million downloads.

"Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in a statement. "Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow."

One of the most touted new features is the browser's advanced bytecode Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to six times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and up to four times faster than Firefox 3.1, according to Apple.

Safari 4 now offers HTML 5 offline support that lets developers build Web apps that store themselves on a computer where they can be immediately accessed. Apps and data can be stored in a traditional SQL-like database serving as an app cache or as a "super cookie," which stores data in a cookie format.

Using what it calls "speculative loading," Safari loads ahead of time documents, scripts and style information needed to view a Web page, so pages are ready when a user wants to view them.

In addition, the new JavaScript Debugger tool cycles through a page's JavaScript and stops when it finds exceptions or erroneous syntax. Users also can pause JavaScript, set break points and evaluate local variables.

Safari 4 also is the first Web browser to support CSS Canvas, which can position canvas elements anywhere in an image.

Other Safari 4 features include full-page zoom, ARIA support, Smart Address Field, full history search and a smart search field.

Safari 4 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download. 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 256 MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500MHz Intel Pentium processor.

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