Safari for Windows: Mozilla was right

Back in January, the Mozilla folks hinted that they expected Apple to deliver a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows.

They were dead-on.

At the opening keynote at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 10, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple is porting Safari to Windows XP and Windows Vista. Jobs is touting the Safari 3 beta as being the “fastest browser for Windows.”

A beta version of Safari 3 for XP and Vista is available for download as of June 11th as a free download from Apple’s Web site.

Testers of the “Leopard” version of OS X, the full-featured beta version of which Apple is distributing at the WWDC conference to paid developers attending the event only, also includes the integrated version of the Safari 3 beta.

Apple is looking for ways to grow its browser market share, which Jobs said currently is at about 5 percent. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has 78 percent of the market, and Firefox another 15 percent, according to the stats Jobs used during his Keynote.

Source: ZDNet

2007
06/13
CATEGORY
Downloads
Interesting facts
Web
9 comments
  • http://www.cristiv.com Chris

    Well Safari for Windows already has vulnerabilities. I know it’s beta but even IE 7 beta wasn’t that bad.
    Firefox starts to have more and more vulnerabilities of all kind.
    I probably won’t use Safari until the final version will be released.
    I hope it will not require iTunes or Quicktime. :lol:

  • http://www.tudy.ro Tudy

    Right now, QuickTime is optional when you download/install Safari. :)

  • http://www.tudy.ro Tudy

    Still, having the first browser that passed the Acid2 test ported on the Windows platform is not something to neglect, when it comes to standard-compliant web development. I think the market share is to be considered here, even if it is just a secondary goal. :)

  • EpsDel

    I was a bit disappointed in Safari. Every time I tried to login to yahoo, I got as far as writing 2 letters of my id and it crashed.
    It’s a bold move to enter the browser “war” these days, since it’s still dominated by the well known monopolist.
    I personally think it’s for the best, since competition is a good thing (maybe those using IE will get updates more often).
    There’s only winning for the users (don’t know for sure if for Apple too)

    On the other hand, Apple might be up to something to increase its market share.

  • http://blog.dever.ro Dever

    As far as I’m concerned I’m just glad that I didn’y find any display problems in Safari with my coded websites.
    As for the browser … it’s cute (text looks better) but useless :lol:

  • Marian

    I’ve tested it.
    Good thing: it’s really much faster than IE. Especially for Yahoo Mail (old layout), digg.com, other AJAX sites. And by the way, I was lucky – it never crashed.
    Bad thing: memory leaks. After a few hours, I managed to make it eat ~ 1 GB of memory. Not even Maxthon (great interface over IE’s engine) ever ate more than half a gig.

  • http://www.tudy.ro Tudy

    Maybe we should wait for it to come out of the beta, hm? :?:

  • Marian

    And by the way, a large portion of the codebase comes from KDE’s konqueror.
    WebCore is based on the KHTML layout engine.

  • EpsDel

    Open Source at the core.