Yesterday at the WWDC Apple announced the release of Safari 4, their most recent update to the Safari web browser. Both the keynote and the press release were filled with the standard self-aggrandizing Apple rhetoric. We've cut away the thick layers of fawning self praise in order to give you a look at the cool new features and functions you can expect from Safari 4.

-Safari 4 will feature the Nitro engine, which can run JavaScript 4.5 times faster than Safari 3. The test was conducted on identical iMacs running Windows Vista and using the SunSpider JavaScript Performance Test.

-Support for HTML 5 and "advanced" CSS effects is built into Safari 4.

-The new Nitro engine loads JavaScript 8 times faster than IE, 4 times faster than Firefox 3. It also loads HTML pages 3 times faster than both IE and Firefox 3. I guess this means we are to assume that Safari 4 isn't any faster than Google Chrome.

-In OSX Snow Leopard Safari runs as a 64 bit application, increasing Nitro performance by "up to 50%".

-New Safari 4 features include "top sites", which will give you a visual preview of your most visited sites, "full history search", which is self-explanatory, and "cover flow" which allows you to flip through web history and bookmarks.