Marcel Winatschek

The Browser That Knows Too Much

Apple dropped a Safari 4 beta and I installed it immediately, because of course I did. The headline features: a Top Sites start screen showing your most-visited pages in a visual grid, CoverFlow for browsing history, inline search suggestions. All of it lifted wholesale from Chrome, as the internet was quick to note. I genuinely do not care. It works, it’s fast, and it’s more stable than anything Safari has managed in recent memory. Free, too, which is the right price for something that mostly just fixes what was already broken.

The only complication came when I opened it for the first time and the Top Sites screen populated. The browser, in its wisdom, had assembled my most-visited pages into a neat visual display for anyone in the room to enjoy. Let’s say the selection confirmed I need to buy more tissues. This is the problem with software that knows you too well—it has no tact whatsoever.