Safari 4 boasts new features for end users and developers, including Cover Flow and Full History Search.
Apple says that its new Safari 4 Web browser was downloaded 11 million times in its first three days of release, suggesting that the application will have long-term legs within the context of the browser wars.
Safari 4 originally made its beta debut in February 2009, but the final version was released in conjunction with Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 8.
New features for the browser include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through "previews" of Websites, and Full History Search, which allows for a full search of Websites stored in the user’s history. A "native look" of Safari for Windows, which includes Windows standard-font rendering and a native title bar, could be an attempt by Apple to take market share away from the PC browser market, which tends to utilize Internet Explorer. For developers, Safari 4 includes tools for debugging JavaScript, inspecting offline databases, testing experimental pieces of code and examining page structure. Apple suggests that the Nitro engine in Safari 4 is capable of running JavaScript some four times faster than the previous version of Safari.
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