Safari 4 Preview

Dreaming about a Safari during your next week's trip to Africa? Well, as long as you're not going to kill any animals, it's fine for me. As long as you're not going to get killed by some animals, it should also be fine for you, but what about taking a long and adventurous journey...on the Web? You'll still be in a Safari, but this time coming from Apple, of course! What about it? A preview of version 4 has been sent to developers already!

First of all, a side note - since a lot of newcomers into the Apple world discover this amazing company with the iPhone, I think it would be really useful for them to check my Safari 3 for Windows review. OK, so I said that, and now we can get back to the early version of the next-gen Safari browser from Apple...

According to sources familiar with the subject, the current Safari 4.0 builds are 40A12, for Leopard, 40A8, for Tiger, and the Windows build is also labeled 40A12, like the one for Mac OS X Leopard. So...what's new?

Well, it seems this new version is paving the way of a new "Develop" menu, a completely redesigned Web Inspector, as well as a JavaScript profiler and an integrated JavaScript debugger. Even more, the upcoming Safari 4 browser is expected to include many enhancements currently bundled into the latest WebKit version, with rich HTML 5 support, and revised Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) support, including masks, gradients, reflections, and specifying a named canvas.

These being said, I think it is also worth being mentioned that new Mac OS X 10.5.5 builds have been released, for both the desktop and server editions. In the end, we may see next month as a meeting point for a lot of major software and hardware updates from Apple. For now, nothing is official yet, as usual, but I can feel it getting closer...