Safari 4 launched – bliss or a miss?
Chicago (IL) – Safari 4 Beta, which Apple unleashed into the wild yesterday, brings several new features that are not everyone’s cup of tea. Some would like to turn off the flashy features because they eat up a lot of CPU time on an average system. Others are simply annoyed by the eye-candy and want it gone so they can “just browse”. Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t let you turn new features on and off through easy-to-use dialogs. However, with a little hackery you can change hidden preference settings to selectively turn on or off many new features, as well as control how those new features work.
If Safari 4 Beta is any indication of the final product, then we’re in for lots of new features and visual treats rarely seen in a web browser. Safari 4 Beta brings the arrival of Cover Flow mode, which is used for visual flipping through bookmarks and history. In addition, it has a similar visual Top Sites feature which presents up to 24 thumbnails of sites regularly visited in a stunning 3D wall. But, what if you don’t want those CPU- and bandwidth-hogging features? Of course, expecting Apple to provide Safari users with a way to selectively turn the new features on and off to their liking is a waste of time. Other browsers also lack such controls as their respective vendors want you to use the new features, not switch them off.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a backdoor to access preference settings usually hidden from us mere mortals, but one actively used by programmers during the development phase. In the case of Safari 4 Beta, we have compiled a list of top ten hacks that allow you to turn off Cover Flow and Top Sites, two key graphically-intensive new features that require lots of CPU time. In addition, you will learn how to tweak the behavior of the address and search fields by turning on/off Google suggestions, preventing recent searches from auto-populating the list, and so on…..Source
Download the latest Safari 4 Browser
