By adding some Mac OS X-like eye candy, several nifty features and a speed boost, Apple has made its Safari Web browser more appealing to current users and more tempting to fans of competing browsers.

Released yesterday as a public beta – that means the software isn’t officially finished yet but should work well enough – Safari 4 is available as a free download from Apple’s Web site in both Mac OS X and Windows flavors.

The most prominent new feature would have to be the “Top Sites” page, a visual panorama of your most frequently visited Web pages. Clicking on one of the preview images immediately takes you to that page. To get the Top Sites page back, just click on the grid icon to the right of the bookmark icon in the toolbar.

Should you want to change the Top Sites page, you can move or delete the previews by clicking on an edit button. If a site has changed since your last visit, a white star on a blue background appears in the top right corner.

I like this feature. Not only does it have the de rigueur Apple cool factor, I can see myself using it a lot. It is, I think, a more convenient way to access frequently visited Web sites than the Bookmark Bar.

The other striking addition to Safari is a Cover Flow view for history and bookmark searches. I don’t use the Cover Flow view all that much in Mac OS X's Finder or even in iTunes, but in Safari 4 that could change.

Many times in the course of writing this blog I’m trying to hunt down something I read days earlier. The Cover Flow view should make those Web pages easier to find.

Speaking of the history, it’s now fully searchable. You can search for page titles, Web addresses and even the complete text of pages in the browser’s history cache.

Another useful tweak: users can now enlarge an entire Web page, rather than just the type, by clicking on the zoom button. I avoided using the enlarge type feature even on pages with maddeningly small type because it almost always scrambled the Web page design, causing visual havoc.

But by enlarging the entire page, everything stays put. Some of the graphic elements look a bit pixilated, but I can live with that. Oddly, the zoom button is not present in the toolbar by default; one must visit the “Customize toolbar” command in the View Menu to do that.

Apple also decided to move the tabs to the very top, where they’re a bit easier to manipulate. Especially welcome is the triangle that appears when you mouse over a tab, making it easier to grab it to rearrange the tabs or pull it out into its own window. And in Safari 4, you can drag separate Web page windows back into the tab bar.

Some users may miss the blue progress bar that used to shoot across the address field as the page loaded. A gray Mac OS X-standard circular progress indicator on the right side of the field has taken its place; the reload button appears there otherwise, moved from its former home beside the back/forward buttons.

In at least one area, Safari 4 is playing catch-up: the search field now offers suggestions as you type in your query (both general suggestions and subjects of other searches you’ve made), something Firefox has done for a while.

For Windows users, Safari has more closely adopted the look and feel of the Microsoft operating system. I think it’s only right that Apple make Safari for Windows look the part. As a Mac user I always hated converted Windows programs that retained their Windows-ish interface.

Finally, Apple is touting Safari 4 as the “world’s fastest browser,” a claim all browser developers seem to make. Supposedly Safari 4 is almost three times faster than Firefox 3 on the Mac when loading Web pages, and more than three times faster than Internet Explorer 7 on Windows.

In my own unscientific tests, I detected scant difference between Safari 3, Safari 4 and Firefox in rendering several Web sites, including Apple’s home page, Yahoo Finance, and the home pages for Disney, the Baltimore Sun and Weather Underground.

In any case, Safari 4 has had no problem rendering any sites I’ve visited so far, a testament to the efforts of Apple’s software engineers to make the browser fully compliant with all Web standards.

Although Safari 4 is beta software, those who’d like to try it should not be afraid to download it. Be forewarned, however, that installing Safari 4 will overwrite your Safari 3 app (though this will not affect your bookmarks, autofill data or history). So if you want to go back to Safari 3 for any reason, make sure you have a copy of it somewhere else.