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Here are some of the changes:

Top Sites

Thanks to Top Sites, you can enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites without lifting a finger. Safari 4 Beta tracks the sites you browse and ranks your favorites, presenting up to 24 thumbnails on a single page. You can even customize the display by pinning a favorite site to a specific location in the grid. That locks it into position, so you know just where to find it every time you open Top Sites.

Wonder which sites have changed since your last visit? Sites with a star in the upper-right corner have new content. A single click opens the page and updates its thumbnail. Whenever you want to return to your ever-evolving Top Sites page, just click the new Top Sites button in the bookmarks bar.

Cover Flow

New to Safari, Cover Flow offers a highly visual way of reviewing your site history and bookmarked sites, presenting full-page previews of the websites that look exactly as they did when you last visited them.

One look is all you need to recognize the site you want to visit. Simply flip through website previews in Cover Flow the same way you flip through album art in iTunes. Directional arrows let you browse forward and back. Or you can quickly flip through multiple sites using the slider. And when you find the site you want, simply click to open it.

Full History Search

With Full History Search and Cover Flow, what you see is where you went. Safari introduces a dramatic new way to revisit sites, letting you flip through full-page previews of the sites you visited in the past. You may not have total recall, but Safari does, automatically storing all the text and a thumbnail of every page in your history. That makes it easy for Safari to get results even if you remember little about the site you’re searching for.

Just type a word or phrase in the History Search field in Top Sites, and Safari quickly presents you with a list of possibilities. In fact, you can search for anything that was on a page you visited, even photo captions. To jog your memory, Safari presents the sites it finds in Cover Flow, giving you the opportunity to spot the right site on sight.

Tabs on Top

Tabs offer a great way to have multiple pages open at the same time in a single browser window. And to switch back and forth with a click. Now Safari takes tabbed browsing to new heights — to the very top of the browser window — instantly providing more room for you to enjoy the sites you’re reading.

Safari also makes it easy to create and manage tabs. To create a new tab, just click the + button in the upper-right corner of the Safari window. Want to rearrange tabs? Simply drag a tab by its handle and drop it in a new location in the tab bar. You can also use the handle to drop a tab into another Safari window. Or quickly create a new window by dragging the tab out to the desktop. You can create a bookmark from a group of tabs. Or even tell Safari to open a set of tabs every time you open a new Safari window.

Nitro Engine

Still the world’s fastest web browser, Safari outraces Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. On even the most demanding Web 2.0 applications, Safari delivers blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies.

Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.

Windows Native Look and Feel

If you’re using Safari on a PC with Windows Vista or Windows XP, you’ll feel right at home. That’s because Safari features a native look — just like other Windows applications — including a native title bar, borders, and toolbars. To provide a consistent Windows experience, Safari now uses Windows standard fonts, but you can choose to use Apple’s crisp anti-aliased fonts if you prefer. Of course, Safari in Windows delivers the same lightning-fast performance provided by the Mac version.

Developer Tools

In Safari, developers will find the best set of development tools ever included in a browser. Just turn them on in Safari preferences and use them to examine the structure of a page, debug JavaScript, optimize performance and compatibility, inspect offline databases, or test experimental pieces of code on the fly.

This is Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week. It is about web application security issues and possible solutions.

Nice post which presents some of the new features that will come with CSS 3.0 and the Safari support of them. In the original post you can find also some demos.

You see, even 3 months ago Safari 3.0 was far out in front of the other major browsers in implementing the incredibly cool features of CSS 3.0, the next generation of the W3C’s Cascading Style Sheets standard. But back in March, that implementation was buried in the open-source WebKit browser framework, which very few Mac users ever use directly, and in the alpha version of Safari 3.0, available only to a few thousand Mac OS X developers.

Suddenly, with last week’s announcement at the Apple developer conference, the latest, greatest, state-of-the-art WebKit framework, with its powerful CSS 3.0 tools, is available to over 95% of the public through the Safari public beta. That being the case, it’s clearly time to get to know the CSS 3.0 features a bit better.

And what features might those be? Well, without writing the whole article in this introduction, here’s a short list of the CSS 3.0 styles that I am most anxious to master:

1. Box-shadow: Yes! Add drop shadows through CSS!
2. Multi-column layout: Can we really do this now? With HTML?
3. Resize: Give JavaScript hacks a rest and let users relax when typing input on web pages.
4. Rounded corners: Any
can be made round.
5. Colors with transparency: There goes another ugly hack from way back!
6. Background image controls: Remember how great it was when you could add images as well as colors to an element’s background CSS style? Well, it’s about to get a whole lot better!

This article lists the CSS 3.0 features that are available today only in Safari 3.0 or the nightly WebKit browser. But I wasn’t content to just list them… I wanted to play around with them as well. So each feature is accompanied by a demo or two and some explanatory notes. Since some of the features are a bit complex, and almost totally lacking in documentation from either W3C (which only lists the standards, not the implementation details), Apple, or the WebKit team, I’ve had to experiment to discover what some of the attributes do.

Fortunately, a forward-thinking group of techno-weenies is keeping a close eye on the emerging details of the CSS 3.0 implementations, and they have done some experimenting of their own. Since they’re in the same boat I am (actually, they have a much better boat!), it’s not surprising that I’m finding ambiguities in the way they’ve built some of their demos. Still, it’s the closest thing to documentation that I’ve found, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in learning more about CSS 3.0 pay a visit to the terrific CSS3.info website. In fact, you’ll find links to their pages throughout this site.

Following CSS3.info’s lead, I’m organizing the (at this time) Safari-specific implementations into four categories: Borders, Background, Text Effects, and User Interface. These correspond to the W3C draft modules for CSS 3.0. The fifth tab in the navigation control below gathers the CSS 3.0 specifications that have been implemented by Safari and at least one other major browser. As you browse through these up-and-coming features, I think you’ll understand my excitement about the benefits they offer to web graphic- and user-interface designers.

Since it’s clear from doing one or two of these that it’s going to take me some time to demo all 7 of the Safari-only features, I’m going to start with what I’ve got today and leave placeholders for the rest. I’ll add the demos as time and energy permits. In the meantime, as mentioned before, do pay a visit to CSS3.info for their demos of each. I hope you’re inspired to take up a keyboard and pound out some experiments of your own!

Before I leave you to the demos, I’m sure some readers are wondering about my statement that Safari 3.0/WebKit is far in the lead in implementing CSS 3.0. Here then are the stats in case you’d like to keep score. Of the 19 CSS3 styles documented by CSS3.info as having been fully or partly implemented by at least one of the major browsers thus far, Safari has done 18 of them:

1. Safari: 18
2. Firefox: 9
3. Opera: 5
4. IE7: 0 (?)

Note: This is only counting browsers that have a publicly released version available, not those that have announced future plans.
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