I was happy to see Apple’s announcement of the public beta of Safari 4 the other day. I of course went out and downloaded it, and really liked some of the wiz-bang changes that they made to Safari. That is until I found that Gmail no longer works. Then I plugged in my iPhone and found that it could no longer sync to iTunes. Heck even MobileMe was giving me grief.
The new “Top Sites” feature has a very nice graphical look, and the cover flow style of browsing history is cool. I know that many may not like the obvious copy of Chromes top tabs, but I like it. Behind the scenes, a faster Java Script engine brings speed improvements. The updated WebKit rendering engine now supports HTML 5, better CSS 3 support for reflections, gradients, and more. It even passes the Acid3 rendering test.
All these improvements, and I had to revert back to my older safari because it is really broken. What a sad state of affairs. No Chrome for Mac yet, and Safari 4 beta is unusable for me at this time.
Well, I discovered that Google Gears installed in safari is what was breaking gmail, and it looks like it was the culprit for iPhone syncing to iTunes. Odd…
Gonna poke at it some more an see if that fixed all the issues that I was experiencing.
OK, this is much better without Google Gears installed. There are some occasional freezes, and other oddities, but nothing bad enough to stop messing with Safari.