So the word is out that Safari 4 Developer Preview is in fact lurking around the hand of developers. Turns out that my free ADC membership has it up for download too. So I played with it a while and I will talk about one feature that sets it apart from other browsers.
Safari 4 File menu
Fluid
Safari web app of Facebook(left), Fluid version(right). Notice that fluid has proper icon.
Safari 4 now allows you to save your favourite web apps as…. none other than APPS themselves. So what the heck does that mean? It means that you can have a Facebook app, Gmail app, WordPress app - you name it!
While some may argue the need for such a feature, I believe there are some people out there that relies heavily on web apps for their work. Thus, having a separate app for the site alone might help to:
- Prevent crashes when too many tabs are open in one browser
- Probably minimise memory leaks for leaving your browser on too long (???)
Some of you might be familiar with Fluid, an app that allows you to do just what I mentioned above. It has some rather cool features as well. But let’s see some main differences between the two.
These are screenshots of a web app saved using Safari 4 on the left and Fluid on the right. Notice something? That’s right, Fluid version of Facebook seems to be almost 28 times larger. But then again, Safari doesn’t have as much features compared to Fluid. So it’ll all up to user preference, personally I don’t really need Coverflow view of all links on a certain page because even though that’s cool, it’ll just mean that my quota will drain faster.
What are your thoughts? Do we really need such feature? So far I think it’s kinda redundant, but then again I’m not really a web app maniac yet! ;)
