I just finished following WWDC 2007 keynote from web live text coverage. Even though I get my living from developing J2EE applications, it was curious to see what Steve Jobs would announce. One of the surprises was Safari 3. New Safari version was expected to ship with Leopard but Apple decided to pull rabbit out from the hat. They announced that Safari 3 beta will be available right away both OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

So, the browser market got a new turn. But how does it differ from previous Safari version? I downloaded the Safari 3 beta on my trusty PowerBook 12" (1.5Ghz G4, 768 RAM) and restarted as installer demanded it. Apple's website claims it to be faster than before and it seem to be true - at least now. Usually the old Safari became faster just by killing it and starting up again. It will remain to be seen if this new version also becomes sluggish after couple days usage.

The user interface is pretty much same as it used to be. But there are some nice new features. As I use Firefox 2 at work I was more than pleased to see inline find. It works pretty much like you would expect it to work. The difference to Firefox is that it highlights current found item with small animation.

There are also other additions. Tabs can be moved around or torn away from parent window. It is now possible to mail contents or the URL of the page. It also looks like that bookmark and history handling has received some new features.

So far I have seen only one web page rendering wrong (http://www.taloussanomat.fi/) and I have not managed to crash Safari 3 beta. There is also strange new feature which allows to resize input text areas. But I am not happy for this as Apple was describing Safari to be the development platform for iPhone and Safari 3 beta does not have iPhone emulator... How could I develop my killer app for iPhone now?