Hello, my name is Chris Matier, and I hate Internet Explorer. Well, maybe hate is a strong word, but I definitely don't like it much. After all, nearly half of my computing time is done on Apple products, and Microsoft gives me no love. I use safari on my Macs, but Idefinitely don't like Safari in Vista much either. That is until today; right now, I am running the beta release of Safari 4 on both platforms, and so far I love it.

Apple is known for eye-candy, and that is the same for their software; Safari is no exception. The cover flow history interface serves no real purpose other than to look really fancy, and the "top sites" feature is no different than Opera or Chrome's speed dial except that it is much prettier. Thankfully, Safari 4 brings much more to the table other than cover flow and fancy histories; it is fast, and it loads many pages much quicker than Firefox. Yeah, Apple says it is faster, but it really is - trust me. Safari has also lost the stupid address bar and gained a smart address bar. What this means is that you can type in a phrase or word, and Safari will finally work like every other web browser.

Under the hood it seems stable and usable, but keep in mind it is a beta. I have done a lot to it including wringing all of Google's apps through it and it has yet to crash on both my MacBook and my HP Tablet. This is something I could not say for Safari 3 or Firefox 3. So far, so good; I like it. Head over to Apple to download the beta for yourself.