Apple Safari 4 beta

Last week Apple released Safari 4 beta. After reading a couple of overviews, I installed it right away (this review at The Graphic Mac is probably the best one I read) and have been using it as my primary browser since. I have to say, it's impressive. All those claims about speed? I'm no official tester or anything, but they seem to be pretty accurate. My iGoogle page, for example, has bunch of gadgets (or whatever they're called), which as you may know, rely on JavaScript. In Firefox the page took a few too many seconds to load. I'm not patient on the web at all so those few too many seconds made me change my default home page in Firefox (and Firefox's general slowing down after awhile turned me back to Safari 3 some weeks ago). In Safari 4, however, iGoogle is snappy and loads in a couple seconds. What really appealed to me, however, was the updated Developer Tools. What kept me using Firefox wasn't Firefox. It was Firebug – quite frankly, the best web development debugging tool ever (for HTML, CSS and JavaScript anyway). I had tried Safari 3's Developer Tools on more than one occasion and had been less than impressed. But Safari 4 is a huge improvement. It just feels more intuitive than before. It comes **really** close to matching the power of Firebug when it comes to viewing and debugging HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but still lacks in a few areas. Since we use jQuery a bit around here, that was one thing I noticed - I don't see the real-time DOM editing when a script is run in Safari 4 like I do in Firefox. But that hasn't stopped me from continuing to use Safari 4. I can always hop back over to Firefox if I need to but it's rare. Safari 4 beta is just more elegant to me. It's a pretty solid browser (even for being beta) that works well and just seems to get out of the way of your browsing experience.