Safari 4 to Allow Saving Web Pages as Applications

Apple, last Friday released the latest version of its Safari web browser - Safari 4.0, to the developer community. Amongst the new feature additions, there is one feature that will appeal to the general users.

On the Mac, Safari 4.0 takes the well known Web Clip feature one step ahead by allowing web pages to be saved as independent Mac apps. These pages, or site specific browsers, can be run independent of Safari. This functionality could be earlier achieved by a few third party apps like Prism and Fluid, but having it built in to the browser will be an added plus.

With the current scenario in bandwidth availability, saving web pages had become a thing of past or an uncommon affair. This feature however might bring Mac users back to saving pages. It would be interesting to have an independent app for commonly visited websites like Twitter, Google, Facebook and such. It will free the users from the hassles of having unmanageable number of tabs open in a browser. Though it is unclear as to when Safari 4.0 will be available to the general users, this feature will be liked by all.

Apart from this, the new build will have a new "Develop" menu, a redesigned Web Inspector, and JavaScript debugging and profiling options. It also carries over features from the new build of WebKit which include support for HTML 5. It will also support CSS gradients, reflections, masks and named canvases.