This week, Apple rolled out the public beta of its new Safari 4 web browser. Faced with the stiff competition in the browser market, Safari 4 came out swinging – promising faster loading times, a polished interface and a handful of new tweaks to make your browsing experience swifter and more aesthetically pleasing.

However, taking on Google's innovative Chrome browser, which took us by a very pleasant surprise when it dropped into open beta back in September, the lovey-dovey open sourciness of Firefox and the lumbering behemoth of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is no mean feat – so how does Safari 4 compare?

We'll start with probably the most important factor – the speed. Now, you might be thinking that there's not a hell of a lot a browser can do to speed up your surfing, given that it's mostly down to your internet connection speed rather than your software. And that's true to an extent, but Safari 4 boasts a new Nitro JavaScript Engine designed to make browsing faster. Apple proudly claims that it can execute JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.

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