As Firefox continues to become more popular and Google Chrome is struggling to get more attention, Apple did not waste its time and rolled out a new version of its web browser. Safari 4 is now available for download, even though it is still in its development phase. However, reviewers put Apple’s new browser to the test and overall, it looks like the developers at the company has done a good job so far.

Apple claims that Safari 4 is the quickest browser on the market right now, along with being good looking, too. Surprisingly, though, it seems that Safari actually proved to be faster than its competitors in several benchmarks, crushing both Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Moreover, Safari 4 was faster even than Firefox 3 in terms of HTML and JavaScript rendering speed. Still, the web browser couldn’t beat Google Chrome in the latter’s V8 benchmark, but it was closer than any other browser.

The new version of Safari also looks and feels better. One of the nicest features on the version 4 is the Top Sites layout. Top Sites displays thumbnails of the most visited 12 sites. There is a similar feature in Google Chrome, but in Safari, you can choose to display six bigger thumbnails or a compelling list of 24 web sites. You can also pin a certain website to a location in the list, a nice way to have visual bookmarks of your favorite sites.

The History feature brings along the Cover Flow interface, familiar to iPod users. Some reviewers pointed out that Cover Flow is actually more usable to find what you are looking for, instead of searching through a text list.

Overall, it must e said that Safari isn’t as customizable as Firefox, since Apple doesn’t offer much support for developers. Even so, when fully released, Safari 4 might be the way to go when surfing the web.