I have to say, I really don’t like it. I installed it and used it for a day, and I have to say that the feature I like most is the ability to easily uninstall it and have Safari 3 back. Even using my fairly new late-2008 Macbook Pro, performance was abysmal. Maybe it was just something about my machine, but it was like going from smooth graphics performance to a choppy 1-frame-per-second nightmare. Scrolling would not roll, it sputtered and jumped. And frankly, most of the features are simply unnecessary eye candy–wasteful, in fact.

The Top Sites really doesn’t make sense. It essentially comprises an automatic loading of a dozen commonly-visited sites whether you want them right now or not. I set up my bookmarks so that the top sites I decide on will load when I click the bookmark; Safari 4’s new feature does the same thing with processor-eating and time-consuming graphics, and it chooses sites in an order I no longer control. What’s so great about that?

Cover Flow was never one of my favorite Apple features, and it seems that Apple isn’t happy unless it’s everywhere. Don’t need it. And Tabs on Top is just stupid–like Apple is trying to copy Chrome or something. Tabs on top even limited the ability to remove tabs from one window and drop them into other windows–you now have to grab the tab in a small, specific area to do that (not intuitive, Apple). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with tabs where they are in Safari 3–in fact, having them closer to where your mouse is usually focused (the body of the web page) makes more sense, not less. Why limit functionality so you can place a perfectly reasonable feature in a less familiar and less logical position? And why did they get rid of the blue page-laoding animation in the address bar? I always thought that was the best such indicator among all browsers, and now they just replaced it with a rotating doohickey that gives you no clue as to how much of the page has yet to load.

There were actually a few features that I found useful–the full-page zoom made sense and has been too long in coming, and the smart address and search fields seemed to hold promise, though I didn’t explore them fully. For me, the fact that the extra features choked the graphic performance were the biggest down point. Hopefully the final version of this beta product will perform a lot better, and they’ll make it so you can disable the new features à la carte without having to access the Terminal.