Safari 4
Chrome for mac and linux is also out, but it's like an alpha so there's nothing to say about it.
Safari 4 is FAST. I've been playing with the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 for about a week or two now, personas are really great and obviously I can't live without things like, session manager, Firebug, yslow, live http headers, and most importantly the Awesome Bar. But Safari 4 is so FAST. Fast as in, the Javascript on a page, even a really intense page is almost instantly interpreted and run, and the structure of the page is rendered long before images even begin to load.. over broadband.. I usually find Safari frustrating to use because you can't search from the Address bar like every other browser can. Firefox has the Awesome Bar, which among other things typing in keywords or sentences uses Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search, on Safari doing that you get an error. The debug, html/css/javascript/network monitoring tools in Safari weren't as interactive as Firebug, although they are much improved now and visually much more appealing. On top of that there's a bunch of developer extras in Safari like the Activity Monitor, the ability to change the user agent which let you impersonate other browsers (a valuable feature that Opera actually implemented years ago). You can disable various aspects of a page like cache, images, scripts, etc. easily, Debugging and Profiling Javascript built in which I guess is standard now, and the web inspector supports monitoring and debugging new stuff in html 5 like html databases.
Now that it's finally using the new Webkit builds it fully passes the Acid 3 test. Also the latest trend in browsers (started by Google Chrome) is individual threads for tabs, Firefox is implementing it in their latest beta and Safari 4 too has mechanisms for protecting other tabs from that one rogue site that burns a hole in your cpozone. Safari looks a lot better than it did in betas visually, especially when you peel tabs off a window to create a new window or do the reverse. Another cool thing about Safari on Mac is web clips. You can clip out a part of a website and stick it in the dashboard where that clips stays live. And the new top sites page gives you live previews of your favourite and most visited sites like Google Chrome and a number of Firefox plugins, and being able to search across all the text of all the web pages in my history and scroll through the history or search results in coverflow is a nice touch too.
Above everything else Safari's brute speed over any other browser out there makes me want to use it, so I went looking for some plugins to make the experience as usable as Firefox. I realize that the new Firefox is coming out soon and will be much faster than the beta but Safari is just so fast.
The first plugin is Inquisitor, super enhanced search. The latest version is even better than what I remember, and it looks like they have an iphone app and plugins for Firefox and IE. Check out Inquisitor http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php
The second plugin is, well there are a bunch that let you search from the address bar, but none support Safari 4 yet, soo.. what do I do now? I guess I'll just wait for the Firefox 3.5 RC to hit next week, rumoured to be ~250% faster than it was and put it in the same league as Chrome and Safari 4. Here's hoping. Actually go check out Mozilla's 'Show us your speed' campaign http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fastest/ .
