Safari for Windows! Yawn...

So Apple finally realized that most of the world doesn't have a Mac and are probably using Windows even if they have an iPod or plan to buy an iPhone. As a result, they released the first public beta of their web browser, Safari, for Windows. Hooray, another application to deploy over the summer! Or not...

Initial tests by Wired News show that Safari is actually slower than IE7 and Firefox in important applications. Sure, this is a beta, so nobody is expecting a perfect product. However, given that all tests were done with Google Ajax applications and Apple has been especially tight with Google lately, I'd have hoped that this would be one place where Safari might excel. Steve Jobs certainly touted its speed at WWDC. What was that he said? Oh right, here it is:

“So what we’ve got is the most innovative browser in the world. but we’ve also got the fastest browser on Windows,” said Jobs. It’s twice as fast as IE, 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, and features built-in Google and Yahoo search.

So what does this mean for Ed Tech? Nothing. IE, Firefox, and Opera (just to name the most mainstream) are already snappy, mature browsers (that also have nice little bars for searching Google and Yahoo). I confiscate enough iPods from my students. I don't need to install Safari for them now, too.