Despite the numerous problems that a lot of Windows users are having with this Beta, and the multiple security vulnerabilities that have been discovered. One of the things that has been overlooked is what exactly is new with this release.

  • New Search function - when you use the search command to find a particular text on a site (usually by pressing ctr+f) on most browsers (like Internet Explorer or Firefox), the only thing that the function does is to highlight the background of those words, which sometimes makes finding what you want nearly impossible, if the site has a lot of text.

    In Safari, when you search for a word, the whole site will be come dim, similar to what happens when you’re on the shutdown options of Windows XP, and the text that you searched becomes highlighted with a large orange rectangle, which makes it much easier to find what you want. This particular feature is definitely a big plus compared to the alternative browsers.

  • Text Fields resize - although this feature doesn’t work with all text fields I’ve tried so far, for some unknown reason, you can now resize the area where you’ll usually write long texts. This is specially useful in forums or in blogs when you intend to write big texts, and I’m surprised that this functionality hasn’t been implemented by more browsers. Another big plus compared to the alternatives.
  • Tab closing warning - you now receive a warning when closing the browser with multiple tabs open. Nothing special here.
  • Google server search on error pages - when you visit a wrong url, or the browser can’t connect to the site you will have a google search box on the error page, which is nice I guess, but not too special.
  • Drag out tabs as new windows
  • Add bookmarks for the opened tabs - a very nice feature of Safari, is that you can automatically add bookmarks for all of the opened tabs at once. This is particularly useful for when you receive a link list from a friend and want to add them all. In my case, this feature will be useful.

You can find a couple of other features (one of them is Mac-only) on tuaw’s article.