Apple releases Safari 4 beta (Updated with Acid3 results)

Apple today announced a public beta of Safari 4 which it is calling "the world’s fastest & most innovative browser." The 31.7 MB download has the following new features:

• The Nitro engine – runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3
• Top Sites – a visual preview of frequently visited pages
• Full History Search – to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages
• Cover Flow – to easily flip through web history or bookmarks
• Tabs on Top – to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive

Have you downloaded it yet? What's your favorite feature?

Update: The new Safari 4 public beta released today scores 100/100 on the Acid 3 test.

Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a web browser follows certain web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. (Wikipedia)

This is an improvement over Safari 3.2.1 (5523.15) which scored worse – 75/100. By comparison, Firefox 3.0.6 on the Mac scores an abysmal 56 (on mine) to 71/100. The WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Epiphany, Arora) are the only ones to pass the test. More results can be found in the Wikipedia entry for Acid 3.

Update 2: If you're only getting 98 or 99 out of 100 with Safari b4 (as I was) clear out your caches and you should be able to get a perfect score.