Safari 3 goes public beta today - so here's a 30 second review of the features and the downsides of the beta upgrade.

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New Features

  • Tabs can be rearranged.
  • Tabs can be pulled off in to new windows - very useful for multiple monitors, and conversely merged back in to one window.
  • Inline searches - ala Firefox search (with a preview with the number of matches).
  • There is a built in element inspector when you have the debug menu turned on.
  • Drosera also works with Safari (though you have to manually enable it) - which means JavaScript debugging for developers.
  • Text boxes can be dynamically resized in the page to ease the pain of tiny textareas.
  • CSS support is better - but again due to the latest Webkit, for example, buttons can be styled whereas they couldn't be in Safari 2.
  • For the developers: if you pass multiple items to the console.log Safari doesn't crash anymore - yay! - but it still only logs the first item.
Safari 3 public

Downsides

  • Installs over Safari 2. This means you're now viewing sites in the latest WebKit - but Safari's render engines are pretty close between versions.
  • SIMBL plugins don't appear to work. I use Safari Stand and Safari Tidy for a quick view on page validation - and now they don't work.
  • The RSS icon is still the sad little blue icon, instead of the standard orange RSS icon.

Conclusion

I'm sure there's a few more bits tucked away, and some nice speed improvements (but that would have been available in the Webkit in the first place).

There's some nice little features that makes Safari slicker. For me, the Webkit upgrade and the DOM element inspector are the biggest advantages.

However, the fact that I can't run my SIMBL plugins may cause me to uninstall until October. There's even rumours of ending plugin support entirely in Safari.

The SIMBL plugins do appear to work - and I've since installed the beta version of Safari Tidy and it appears to work fine.