Developer tools

If you're a Web developer, Safari 4 offers a number of new and/or improved development tools to help you build effective sites. A full-blown Web inspector lets you see page structure, debug JavaScript, and optimize performance. An Elements inspector lets you view your site's CSS, and even make changes which are then previewed on the page in real time.

A resources panel displays the loading order and time for every element on a page, showing you exactly where a hang-up might be occurring. You can also sort the results by latency, response time, or duration, and you can graph resources by size or load time. In my brief time with these tools, I've found them to be very well done--Safari 4's tools may not offer every feature of the popular and web development plug-ins for Firefox, but they come a lot closer than they ever used to--and the tools that are there seem to be very well done.

Windows world

Those who use Safari on Windows get everything discussed here, plus some additional Windows-only changes. Until now, Safari on Windows has looked very much like Safari on the Mac--the user interface, buttons, and even the font rendering were all taken directly from OS X. While Safari looks perfectly at home on OS X, it looked completely out of place in Windows XP or Vista, having an interface that was unlike anything else on the platform (except for iTunes!).