Apple Safari 4: Crash-Resistant And 7.8x Faster Than IE8

It wasn't all hardware at Apple's WWDC 2009 event: Safari 4, the company's browser, finally came out of beta, and Phil Schiller saved some fighting talk for all web rivals.  According to Apple, Safari 4 is 7.8x faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, and passes all 100 of the Acid 3 tests while IE8 languishes behind at 21/100.

Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant, thanks to a new way of handling plugins.  According to Apple, plugins are the number one cause of browser crashes; by splitting them off as a separate process, should the plugins fail the browser itself will continue to run. 

Other changes include Cover Flow review of the browser history and full Spotlight search.  Safari 4 is available to download now, for Leopard, Tiger and Windows systems.