Apple released the first beta of Safari 4 today.
http://www.apple.com/safari/ http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15675/apple-safari
I figured I might as well give Safari 4 a spin, since I use Camino primarily these days and don't rely on Safari.
I had a bad experience. The installer required a restart, and after restarting almost every application crashed on launch. TextEdit, Terminal, Console, TextWrangler and of course Safari all crashed on launch repeatedly. Activity Monitor and the Finder worked normally, but that was about it.
I quickly removed all SIMBL plugins I had installed, which had no effect. I removed SIMBL itself, also to no effect.
So I uninstalled Safari 4 (they include an uninstaller, fortunately) without ever having used it. After that, a couple apps still kept crashing, but after a second restart that fixed itself.
I'm a little confused about the whole thing. Why Safari should have had such far-reaching effects is a mystery to me. Why some apps would keep crashing for a little while (and only a little while) after I uninstalled it is also a mystery. So, I have to admit that it's possible it's a coincidence.
I've attached a screenshot of the list of files the Safari 4 beta installer package contains, as reported by the
Suspicious Package QuickLook plugin. Apparently it installs a number of system-wide libraries.
If anyone's daring enough to try the beta, post your experiences.