Apple's Safari 4 UI changes hint at plans for Snow Leopard
The new public beta release of Safari 4 reveals the deepest look yet at the future of Apple's software, hinting at what's in store for the closely guarded user interface revamp coming in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, as well as appropriating ideas from other browsers and adding some original flourishes, some of which go boldly and decisively past the company's existing human interface design guidelines.
Some of the changes in Safari 4 are borrowed from external sources, some are new things that will likely migrate into future versions of Mac OS X, and some are features of Leopard or other Apple products that are just now making it to Safari.
Among the new changes is support for 'resolution independent' scaling of the entire web page, just like the iPhone. Rather than only bumping up the size of text and destroying the layout of the page, as web browsers have historically offered to do, Safari 4 allows users to scale the entire page up and down, either using size buttons in the toolbar or multi-touch trackpad gestures on late modeled MacBook models.
