Mac browser goes cross-platform, adds several other enhancements
By Rob Griffiths

Apple kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference with the release of a public beta of Safari 3.0; the finished version will be the bundled browser in Leopard when Mac OS X 10.5 ships in October.
But Leopard isn’t the only OS that this Safari update will run on—and I’m not just referring to Tiger. Apple CEO Steve Jobs also announced that Safari was joining the ranks of iTunes and QuickTime to become a cross-platform app that runs on Windows as well.
What follows is a quick look at some of the more compelling new features in Safari 3.0, which I’m running as a beta on OS X 10.4. I also took a quick detour into the land of XP, courtesy of both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop, to see how well Safari works there.

Speed
During his keynote address to developers, Jobs discussed benchmark results that showed Safari to be the quickest of the “big three” browsers. (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are the other two.) In my limited time with Safari 3, it certainly seems fast. However, I was hard pressed to note any substantial loading time differences between Camino, Firefox, and Safari 3 on my MacBook Pro—they all handled my selection of test pages just fine.

Greatly improved find-on-page
I’ll admit to having a love/hate relationship with the Find function in most browsers—sure, it’s great to be able to find something on a page, but it’s nearly impossible to see those matches once they’re found. Most browsers simply highlight the matches, and, on a page full of text, that can make spotting the matches very hard.
In contrast, Safari 3 makes it really easy to spot the matches. When you press Command-F and enter your search term, Safari dims the current page, shows matches with a bright white background, and shows the currently selected match with a can’t-miss-it orange background:

This is a great improvement over the blind searching I do in the current version of Safari.

Draggable tabs
You can now drag-and-drop tabs to rearrange them.
You can also drag a tab out of the tab bar to create a new window containing that tab. There doesn’t seem to be a “put tab back” command, however. There is a new Merge All Windows command in the Window menu, though, which will do the trick for all open windows—it will place them all into one new tabbed window, and close the others as it does so.

Resizable text boxes
Don’t you hate those Web sites with tiny little fill-in forms? Seems many places don’t know that monitors are larger than 13 inches now, and that we can type more than 80 characters on a row. The new version of Safari takes care of that problem with its resizable text entry boxes.

Other new stuff
In addition to improvements in find, tabs, and text input boxes, there are some other enhancements in Safari 3. In the Bookmarks menu, there’s a new Add Bookmark For These n Tabs menu item, where “n” is the number of open tabs in your current window. Using this feature, you can surf around to a number of places, using Command-click to open each site in a new tab, and then save all those open pages in one step via this new menu item.
In the View menu, to go along with pre-existing options for increasing and decreasing the size of text on the page, there’s a new Make Text Normal Size option—useful if you’ve been going crazy with the other resizing options and lost track of your starting point, I guess!
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