With Microsoft’s IE8 almost upon us, along with Google’s Chrome and the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, it’s great to see us moving beyond the browser dark ages and competition heating up again.

With Safari 4 Apple is continuing to push browser technology ahead and is showing itself as a real contender at having the best browser available.

So here are my impressions:

1. The Good

• Speed – it’s really fast. Especially Javascript
• Better search features – built in google suggest, the location field searches your history, and search boxes placed prominently in the bookmarks section make it easier to find stuff you’ve seen before.
• Excellent developer tools – With an inspector, debugger and a profiler, Safari 4 is approaching Firefox’s usefulness as a web development tool.
• Top Sites – I actually created a homepage that looks a lot like this. Having it built in is real handy. No more editing HTML and taking screen shots.

2. The not-so-sure

• The tabs – these sit right at the top of the window. It’s been a little hard to get used to and isn’t what I’m used to. I think the metaphor is better, but I’m not finding it as simple to use as before.

3. The Ugly

• The progress indicator – it’s gone! The location bar used to show how much was left to download, now I’ve got no idea. This is really frustrating. I hope it’s a bug.

I hope they deal with some of the usability problems by the time it makes it to a full release. But overall I think the Safari 4 Beta is an excellent, competitive browser and offers a very good alternative to IE and Firefox.