If you’re in San Francisco, you may have noticed more nerds than usual wandering around. This is due to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where hardware and software developers go every year to learn from the folks at Apple through a series of sessions and tech labs. Usually, Apple makes a product announcement to kick off the WWDC.

Yesterday, Apple showed off lots of snazzy features of its upcoming version of OS X (labeled ‘Leopard’) showing up in October. But they also brought out something you can use right now: a public beta of Safari 3.0.

That doesn’t sound so exciting at first, but the big news is that this version of Safari brings the popular Mac browser to Windows users. If you’ve got Mac OS 10.4.9, Windows XP, or Windows Vista, you can try the latest version of Safari now.

Download the public beta from apple.com/safari.

So what’s new in Safari 3? According to the Apple Safari site, speed is the number one improvement. But while it seems that browsing speed has improved, the speed of launching the application (especially the first launch after a restart) seemed unusually slow to me.

A handy new feature is text field resizability. Writing a message board post in a small text field? Trying to revise a long blog post? Just drag the lower-right corner of the text field to expand it. Easy!

I also like the new Find feature. As always, press Command-F (I guess that will be Ctrl-F for you new Windows Safari users!) to find a word on a page. Instead of the old Find dialog, you’ll see a small bar appear. Enter the word and it will be highlighted prominently on your page everywhere it appears.

When using the new Find bar, your page is dimmed and your word is highlighted in orange and white.

Safari also includes some new user alerts in this version, which can be annoying or helpful, depending on how you look at them. When quitting the application, Safari will ask you if you really want to quit and let you know how many windows you have open. If you’re working on a form-based page and attempt to close the window, Safari will ask you if you’re sure, saving countless blog posts and shopping carts from that horrible “I didn’t mean to hit Command-W” oblivion.

Now for the bad news: every time I attempted to drag an image from a Web page to the desktop or an application, Safari froze. I’ve never experienced this problem in previous versions, and it sure is frustrating, requiring a Force Quit and (slow) relaunch of the application each time. Is it a deal-breaker for most users? Probably not (keep in mind that this is still in beta), but it’s a big drawback all the same. (By the way, always be smart and back up important info prior to using any beta product.)

All in all, the major thing about this upgrade is the move to Windows, but Mac users should enjoy the new speed and some of the functional new features. And if you don’t? Well, an uninstaller comes with the download.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 5:22 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.