Apple has just dropped an announcement of the public beta of Safari 4, touted to be the fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac and Windows PCs in the world. Hopefully they will be able to live up to this claim, as Safari 4 uses the Nitro engine which is able to run JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3 in a controlled test environment. As with any new version of software or hardware, one can expect new innovative features to make the cut, and in this case, we hope that our browsing experience will be more intuitive and enjoyable. One of the more interesting feature that we’d look forward to would be Top Sites, as it offers a visual preview of frequently visited pages (would it be like thumbnails found in Google’s Chrome?), a full History Search, Cover Flow for easy flipping through web history or bookmarks and Tabs on Top that helps ease the pain of tabbed browsing (not that we found it hard to do so in the first place).

Some of the new features in Safari 4 include :-

• Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click
• Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before
• Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes
• Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones
• Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history
• Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches
• Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text
• Built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility
• A new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows

This is a public beta for both Mac OS X and Windows platforms, and you can download it here for free.