Apple let slip the beta version of Safari 4 last week. We’ve been tinkering with it, and think there are more than a handful of hints towards what’ll be inside the next iPhone as a result.
Are Apple’s desktop and mobile teams working together on Safari? We’d be surprised if it was any other way. Click the link below to follow our train of thought, and get a hint at the new iPhone features that could be just around the corner.
1. Coverflow for the web
Safari on the iPhone already offers tabbed browsing, but it’s nowhere near fancy enough for Apple. It lacks graphical pizzaz, only shows you a sliver of the next and previous tabs, and can sometimes be a bit jerky. The iPhone already offers the nicest Coverflow experience of any Apple device, and since it’s used in Safari 4 to show off your search history, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it appear on Mobile Safari too.
2. Nitro inside!
Safari 4 is blisteringly fast, thanks to the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine inside. It’s powered by WebKit, which lies beneath the surface of Safari. Apple has renamed SquirrelFish Nitro, and since Mobile Safari for the iPhone is also built on WebKit it’ll be a short step from the desktop for the pocket for Apple’s speed increases.
3. Top Sites in your pocket
As well as using Coverflow to navigate your history, Safari 4 has a new Top Sites view, which shows your 12 most visited pages. It looks like a slightly slicker version of Google’s default stat page for its Chrome browser, but we reckon it’d be much more useful on the iPhone. Anything that stops us having to navigate menus and type web addresses on the iPhone is good news. Top Sites could let us jab a thumbnail and surf to a site immediately.
4. Offline browsing
Safari 4 brings support for local database storage, supported by HTML 5. Too techie? All it really means is that the browser can hold data that would otherwise be fetched from the web. That means it’ll support web apps, even while offline. Think Google’s Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, or any other web app you can think of, all available even when you lose your network connection.
5. Finger-friendly auto-suggestions
Safari 4 takes its lead from Firefox 3’s URL bar by offering up suggestions for websites you’ve previously visited as soon as you start typing keywords. If Apple squeezes that feature into the iPhone it could mean a lot less typing, and a lot more surfing for anyone using their iPhone in a rush, which is most of us.
