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 today 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.”
Jobs said that Apple plans to use iTunes as a distribution vehicle for Safari for Windows. He noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.
“We know how to reach these (Windows) customers,” Jobs said.
Are you interested in running Safari on Windows? Why/why not?
