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One of the coolest features revealed in today’s Safari 4 beta release from Apple is Top Sites. This provides a cover flow-style gallery of the sites you’ve recently visited most often. Aside from being helpful, it’s always frighteningly revealing…do I really spend that much time on Facebook?

When you first download and install the Safari 4 browser, it will throw up a splash movie, then move right into displaying your top sites. This is a very slow process…it took a couple minutes to pull in the 12 images, the process of which is shown about halfway through in the image above. After waiting a bit, the image at the bottom right, which is Amazon.com, never appeared.

It’s actually kind of fun to see what sites I’ve visited most frequently, although I suppose it could be telling, so be careful who’s behind you when you do this. In my top 12, which is the default (or at least it was for me), the Appletell posting page was number one, obviously. Beyond that, it was mainly the sites of some of my web design clients and my personal interest sites: IGN, the Minnesota Wild (and NHL.com), my personal blog, etc.

Now, you can view 6, 12 or 24 sites at a time, depending upon how large you want the thumbnails. You set this by clicking the Edit button at the bottom left of the browser, then selecting Small, Medium or Large. While in Edit mode, you can also remove sites from your list by clicking the X, or you can make them permanent by clicking the thumb tack. You can also reorder the sites by dragging them to a new location. Once you move them, the thumb tack automatically turns on (blue) to make it permanent, but you can still delete it or move it around, of course.

Clicking the + button in the upper right of the browser will open a new tab, and you can then click on the thumbnail of the site you want to open the website in that tab.

Of course, you don’t always need to have Top Sites open in Safari 4. It’s simply another tab, after all, so you can leave it by closing the tab. To open it again, you simply click the Top Sites icon in the upper left of the browser, now just right of the standard Bookmarks icon. As is standard in Safari, clicking it will open Top Sites in the current tab, while Command clicking will open it in a new tab.

Stay with us at Appletell for more coverage of Safari 4 as we dig deeper into the beta. The Safari 4 beta is available for both Macintosh and Windows.

Product [Safari 4]