So, I’ve reverted most of these “enhancements” so my Safari looks like it used to again. The one thing I left intact is Cover Flow. Being able to visually identify pages from the history is actually a very handy feature. Also worth noting is the fact that it will not store thumbnails for secure (https:) web sites. Nor will it allow you to add such sites to the Top Pages screen. So they did actually think about what they were doing. Nice to know that they haven’t lost that touch.

The thing I am very impressed about, though, is the new version of WebKit, Safari’s rendering engine. That thing is awesome. It will now actually let you animate any HTML element in a page using only CSS. No JavaScript or Flash required. I’m not talking about animated transitions from one state to the other, which Safari 3 could already do. I’m talking about true keyframe animations here.

Aside from the animations, it can also do pure CSS gradients, anywhere an image could otherwise be used. It also supports alpha masks, reflections, rounded corners, text and box shadows, transformations (scale, rotate, skew, translate) and more fancy stuff. It’s a shame a lot of these features don’t work in more browsers, because with some creativity, they would allow the most fantastic things to be created. Another nice feature is that it also allows SVG images to be actually used as images in CSS as well as <img> tags.

The new Web Inspector and JavaScript debugger/profiler are also very sweet. It’s a pity that it doesn’t seem to dynamically update its DOM tree view as it changes. That means I’ll probably keep using Firebug for web debugging. Its Resources view is very useful though. It uses colors to differentiate between file types, and it also shows latency in addition to the actual file transfer times.

To sum up, now that I’ve tamed it down somewhat, I’m pretty pleased with Safari 4. Can’t wait to see what the final version will be like.