What a wonderful world it would be if every industry were like Web browser software. Companies entangle themselves in a fiery arms race to deliver us the absolute best products, free! Can we get the automakers in on this?

The new Top Sites feature in Apple's Safari 4 beta.

Apple released a beta version of Safari 4 on Tuesday, and it gets a lot of things right. The company bills Safari 4 as the "fastest browser ever," and while my feeble brain has trouble deciphering differences in fractions of a second, it certainly feels snappy.

ZDNet put the claim to the test on the PC and Mac using speed-benchmark software, producing some nifty graphs. Safari did indeed rank in as the fastest -- producing far better results than Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer (and even the new IE8 that hasn't officially come out yet).

Its only main competition in terms of speed are Minefield (the code name for the next major release of Firefox, presumably version 4) and Chrome. Chrome, Google's Web browser, quickly snapped up about 1% of market share in January, according to Net Applications, an Internet statistics firm. (And in the browser world, 1% is no small potatoes.)

Safari 4 takes one of its most notable new features from Chrome -- the relocation of the tab bar, which lists the window's open Web pages. Apple has moved it to the top of the browser -- probably to preserve space. (Some have expressed outrage over the change, so we've provided a tip at the end of this post to switch back to the old tab format.)

This version of Safari also boasts the addition of Cover Flow -- the visual browsing feature in iTunes, on the iPhone and in just about every new Mac application -- and a similar feature called Top Sites. These ...