Wednesday, June 11,2008 @ 9:15am
Apple seeding Safari 4 to developers
Developers are already receiving a seeding of Apple's Safari 4 web browser, according to reports. The build is listed as 5526.11.2, and represents an early version of the same browser intended to ship with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The software is expected to make a variety of enhancements, namely a 53 percent speed boost for JavaScript, which should help smooth out the performance of Web 2.0 sites and related applications. It is believed that this will be accomplished using WebKit's SquirrelFish rendering engine.
Safari 4 should also support saving webpages as local, stand-alone web applications, launched in the same way as apps running in native code. This appears to be an extension of the WebClip concept used on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Critically, Safari 4 will likely not be tied to Snow Leopard, as the current seed includes versions for Tiger, Leopard and Windows. This also suggests that the browser could release before Snow Leopard, if it exists on a separate development track.