If I could place a bet, apple won't adopt the tab metaphor, since it's, well, a bad metaphor. Instead, I'd expect a shelf to slide out from the side of the page that manages all of your page views. For one, it doesn't take up vertical space, it doesn't move the browser view when you go from 0 tabs to 1 tab, and you'd actually be able to read the view names when you have more than a few tabs up there.

Remember, Apple ships wide monitors, so they move things to the sides, not the top and bottom.

Beware: you can very easily become addicted to this feature. Don't start using it if you are not ready to leave your favourite browser.

So far Safari looks fast, very fast, compatible with all sites I visited and overall a nice experience. Considering that this is a beta version it's not bad at all (even if as far as I can remember I've been using beta browsers since 1995, no matter how the versions were called).

The most missed feature, coming from Mozilla, is tabbed browsing. This is something Apple should really consider incorporating. I know that tabbed browsing is used be a very small Mozilla/Netscape users minority, but once you are a tabbed browsing addict it's hard to stop. So wherever you are, whatever you are doing, post on your weblog a request for tabbed browsing, they must hear us.

Spell checking while I write in this text area is working, using Apple's system wide spell checker. Unfortunately the spell checker is considering html tags errors, something that should be addressed.

The other thing that Apple should do imho is implementing an easy to use (both for users and developers) wizzy editor. The ideal solution from my POV would be adding a parameter to text areas: since most browser based systems are already managing the IE5 exception (with Microsoft's wizzy editor), I'm sure that supporting Safari would be easy and widely supported quite quickly, and it would be a reason for more users to switch.

Overall, I think that introducing a new browser after 5 years is a pretty bold move from Apple. They already tried once and failed, but browser wars are over, and they might succeed this time.

Microsoft is leading here: a browser tightly integrated to the OS is strategic, so I don't see why Apple should not have its own. And since no matter what, this is not going to be a leading browser on the Internet, they must stick to standards to maintain compatibility, making support for Safari a no brainer for developers (they/we are not going to support a browser used by less than 5% of users).

A new browser is definetly something I was not expecting, but I must say that I'm quite interested in the outcome.