Apple released the new version of its Web browser for both Mac and Windows computers today. It includes a lot of the flashy features that we’ve come to expect from Apple software. Bookmarks and browsing history can be viewed “cover flow” style, in which images of rendered pages flip past as an animation; the default start page is a personal “top sites”, in which the pages that Safari determines are the user’s most visited appear, also in full, arrayed in a multi-tiered semi-circle:

Notice how the individual Web pages reflect off the bottom surface of the shiny black void. It’s a bit confusing because these screen-shots themselves reflect off the bottom surface of a shiny white void because they’re taken from the Apple site. This consistency it part of what makes the Apple aesthetic so strong. Interestingly, the shiny black thing is relatively new to the brushed metal environment of Apple’s operating system. At the same time, it’s new to the brushed metal of Apple’s actual physical computers:

This isn’t how their machines used to look. That shiny black edge is new for the laptop line, but familiar from the start with the iPhone. Their products are evolving at different rates but all towards a consistent look and feel for both hardware and software (and even their own Website).

But other changes in this release of Safari adopt something from an outside source rather than move the product closer to the Apple ideal. It’s a little thing, but tabs have been moved to the very top of the application window, just like they are in Google’s Chrome browser. There’s also full text history and bookmark search, made possible because Safari caches all the text content from those pages—a feature already present in the Opera browser.

None of the features in Safari 4 are really new, much less revolutionary. Many are typical Mac; some take good ideas from elsewhere. The parts of the application one doesn’t really see are alleged to be greatly improved, supposedly only Chrome can challenge its page rendering times in benchmark tests.

The important thing out of all this is probably that Apple isn’t going to sit out whatever browser wars are coming.