Apple has released a beta of their upcoming Safari 4 web browser as a free download today for both PC and Mac users. The new browser offers both improvements in speed and visual display, offering a unique Top Sites view to display your most visited websites, a Cover Flow mode to flip through your web history, and a full history search feature that can sift through the complete text of web pages you've visited in the past. The beta is available at http://www.apple.com/ca/safari/. Amongst the upgrades is a new Nitro engine that Apple claims can execute Javascript "up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3". Also amongst their claims is Safari's new ability to load HTML pages "three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3".

Here's the complete list of features:• Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;• Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;• Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes®;• Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;• Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;• Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;• Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;• built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and• a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.