As soon as I saw that Safari had a new beta out, being the new Mac convert that I am, I went and grabbed it. Overall, it’s a huge step up! It feels smoother, faster, cleaner, and is no longer a hindrance for me to use as my main browser.
SquirrelFish (now Nitro) the new JavaScript engine is blazingly fast! It makes Gmails’ multi-inbox functionality quick enough to be usable and not annoyingly slow as it was in FF3 and other browsers.
The built in Firebug clone is quite powerful and on the first use was intuitive and smooth.
I much prefer the tabs at the top of the screen as I have a nasty habit of accidentally clicking them as I make liberal use of the bookmark bar. This separates the two bars and avoids such incidents.
Overall, I love it and it quickly replaced Camino as my browser of choice on my work machine (the browser I use for non-work stuff though it could soon overtake Firefox for work stuff.)
However, I do have a few gripes:
1) I dislike the placement of the ‘new tab’ button. I use the button frequently and the upper right corner is not ideal.
2) No easy way to change the default search. While I use Google frequently, I’m also a big fan of Ask.com’s search and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to integrate them so far.
3) In fact you can’t remove the default search bar without removing your location bar, they’re linked. Not a fan of this option either.
“In fact you can’t remove the default search bar without removing your location bar, they’re linked” Yeah I hate that too. :-/
While I dislike the tab placement… it saves much v-space over firefox. not that 20px matters to me on my 24″