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I have been a die-hard Safari user even since I switched over to OS X several years ago. I’ve always liked it’s clean, tabbed interface, as well as other little things like being able to visit non-linked urls (check it out. highlight a url, right-click, go.).

That’s not to say that I haven’t flirted with other browsers. I used Camino for a while, tried out Opera, and I do use Firefox once in a while for some of the cool plugins that make my life better, such as the web developer plugin, and of course the Google PR plugin.

A few months ago, however, I was forced to ditch Safari. Increasingly, it got slower and slower, until frequently it would go into a frozen state for several minutes while it was having a moment to itself. I don’t know what it was doing, but it would spin unresponsively for minutes. Eventually, it would usually come back, but I was usually forced to kill it and start again. I suspect these cycles of frequent freezing and killing was wreaking havoc on my keychain which would become corrupted pretty often as well.

Apple’s release of the Safari 3.0 Beta has prompted me to give it another go.

After firing it up, I noticed NOTHING different. Everything looks the same. They probably should have changed something at the surface to make us feel like something happened! There’s a list of changes, but I haven’t studied it. It’s more interesting to see what I notice. And there are in fact some changes.

After using if for a while, here’s what I found to be different…

1. Performance. Safari starts up nice and quick, and shuts down just as fast. Supposedly it loads sites faster, but that’s hard to quantify. I does just feel better.

So far there have been none of the freeze-ups that I experienced before.

And the transition from private browsing to non-private browsing is also nice and quick. It used to take tens of seconds, or more, for it to do whatever it was doing before.

2. Search. The first time I hit Command-F to search, I thought it was broken. I’m used to a popup window appearing somewhere on the screen to enter my search terms. It didn’t appear. I use two monitors and it usually shows up on the other one, so as my eye moved over there to find it, a cheeky little search bar slid down from the top on the main browser window, like this. In the example below, you can see the search bar at the top, where I’ve searched for the text “bumpzee” on the Bumpzee homepage. You can clearly see all matches, which update dynamically as you type.

Very nice.

3. Resizable Textareas. Aside from resolution of the freezing issues, this very well may be the biggest little feature ever. Down at the bottom right of any textarea is a little grab spot. You can resize any textarea to whatever size you want. As someone who frequently does all editing of large blog posts in this teeny-tiny Wordpress edit window, I love it.

Hot!

4. Compatibility issues. There never were many compatibility issues with Safari, though there were a few notable ones. I still cannot use the WYSIWIG editor in Wordpress 2.1 (but I say so what). PHPmyAdmin does seem to be working better. Before, Safari caused new windows to open up instead of maintaining the two-frame interface. That alone had me using Firefox alongside Safari, so if that one’s fixed, it’s a huge improvement.

So that’s what I’ve discovered after a nice snappy day of working and browsing with Safari 3.0.

Download the Safari 3 Beta here and let me know what you think.

Safari Beta users, what other new features am I missing?

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