live search: the navigation bars and bookmarks

Many Firefox users can quickly point to the as-you-type suggestions for the address and search bars as their favorite feature: the address bar in particular has been nicknamed the "awesome bar" even by Mozilla itself for its ability to accomplish most local searches without needing to dig through bookmarks. Both of these have migrated to Safari 4, and they're both handy as well as better executed.

Typing text or a web address in the main address bar will turn up any results that might exist in sites you've visited. Unlike Firefox, though, the results are clearly separated by kind: bookmarks and history always remain separate. The search bar is closer in spirit to what Mozilla offers and shows you likely search terms culled from the web as well as your own recent searches, though it also adds an ability to find results on the currently active website without having to open a separate search box. Google's all-in-one address bar would be welcome here, but Apple's interpretation does keep the current address visible during a search.

And in a long overdue addition, that same search also extends into the bookmarks panel. Searches are no longer dependent solely on the contents of the website address itself and will show results from both bookmarks and history that contain a word in the title or description, making it possible to find favorite pages among different bookmarks from the same website or an exact article. Like Top Sites, these too are shown in Cover Flow and -- if a preview exists -- can be searched visually.



Faster JavaScript, HTML 5 and web standards

It's less immediately evident, but virtually as (if not more) important than the conspicuous interface changes are the engines underneath. JavaScript gets by far the biggest update and gets a new foundation codenamed Nitro (and known as SquirrelFish in development) that improves sites which make heavy use of the scripting language.

While it doesn't sound exciting on the surface, the feature is definitely the greatest single contributor to the major perceived increases in speed that are noticeable in a few hours of testing. Anyone who has used a Web 2.0 website that depends heavily on interaction will see the change immediately. Digg, Google Docs, SmugMug and other sites that rely heavily on editing and dynamic content get a particularly visible kick from Nitro. Apple is proud enough of it to tout about a 4X boost over Firefox 3.1 and even says it's faster than Chrome, which was built from the ground up to run JavaScript (and which Google uses frequently on its sites).

This is particularly important for web apps, and it only gets deeper with the browser's standards support. Safari is one of the first browsers to support HTML 5 and can now handle certain audiovisual content and even offline caching of significant web code without requiring a browser. Few if any real sites support these yet, but they're critical to a coming generation of web apps.

In the present day, though, Safari also supports a handful of new rendering features that let it pass particularly stringent standards tests and add a few immediately usable technologies themselves. Better support for standards makes it the first officially released browser to pass the Acid3 test; CSS developers also have access to CSS Canvas to place web elements elements anywhere on screen, and CSS Effects to add (primarily Apple-made) visual effects like image masks and reflections. Those with poor eyesight and other physical conditions also get built-in Accessible Rich Internet Applications support to experience more complex sites.

And though it's not touted in any great way by Apple, Safari now has a new speculative loading engine that tries to predict and load the content for pages before you visit them, which has the potential to speed up the perceived browsing experience by readying sites before they've been clicked.