Jon Simpson
Safari 4 Beta
Just installed the Safari 4 beta, and really impressed with how they seem to have moved the browser on, with tabs moved to the top of the window and a new ‘top sites’ view.
They’ve also fixed one of the most annoying bugs in the developer preview, which was its tendency to write a line to the system log (at least on my machine, and I found plenty more examples online) every time a page was visited along the lines of:
Feb 24 14:15:56 localhost kernel[0]: Safari[208] Unable to clear quarantine
`http:%2F%2Fwww.apple.com%2Fsafari%2Fdownload%2F.webhistory': 93
Which as you could expect, is not ideal for battery life and general disk performance if you do a lot of web browsing. A lot of the changes appear to be the cream of features from Google Chrome and Firefox 3, with tabs now on top of the window, a new javascript engine and a more intelligent address bar search (akin to the one in Firefox 3).
Just one small hitch so far, being that I don’t seem to be able to turn off the search suggestions in the Google search box on the right. (I do this on all browsers, and it’s easy on Firefox). No doubt that’ll sort itself out in time, but otherwise a nice, snappy upgrade.
I do wonder if some of the new visual language (smaller title bar text, tabs on top of the window & more use of coverflow-esque visualisation) will spill over into Snow Leopard (certainly my tabbed terminal looks strange against Safari 4’s new tabs).
How to turn off search suggestions in Safari 4 public beta
Update: It’s emerged rather quickly that there are a number of hidden preferences to control Safari 4. The one that interests me, as I wrote originally, is:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO
The removal of Google search suggestions can be reverted by using:
defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest