During Apple’s WWDC event the company released a public beta of it’s next version of the Mac browser called Safari. In addition to new features Apple released a full featured version for Microsoft’s Windows XP and Vista.

Safari 3 has mainly played catchup to the ever successful Firefox and the not so known Opera browsers. While Firefox users might turn their noses up at Safari’s added features, Safari 3 makes a solid upgrade on version 2 for arguably the best Mac OS X browser.

While tabbed browsing is in the current version of Safari, Apple has added the ability to move the order of tabs and make a tab a stand alone window. Even better is the ability to drag one tab to another window with it’s own set of tabs, or even a window with no tabs.

Another feature that Firefox has is the ability to highlight all instances of a word search. Safari makes it very easy to see as the web page dims and the search words stand out.

Other enhancements in Safari 3 finally include a history manager, graphical form buttons and new resizable text fields. The Windows version of Safari 3 somehow looks incomplete when put in comparison with the Windows version of iTunes. The Mac OS X interface elements and the window title look strange amongst the Windows XP interface. It will be interesting to see how Safari will fit on the Windows platform. For Mac users, the new version of Safari is welcome upgrade.

Safari 3 is set to come out with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 in October this year. The browser will run on Mac OS X 10.4.9 and 10.5 as well as Windows XP and Vista.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Reviews. 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.