Apple's world wide developer's conference (WWDC) is taking place this week (June 11-15) and Steve Jobs announced during his keynote address that the Apple Safari web browser has been ported to Windows. Why and who cares, you might ask? Well, Safari is the default browser for Mac OS X, which also runs on the new iPhone. Safari has 5% of the browser market, while FireFox has 15% and Microsoft Internet Explorer has pretty much the rest. Poor Opera, for all of it's versatility and speed just has not been able to catch on in a significant way, but it continues to be developed. (If you have a Nintendo Wii, you can get Opera for it. Apple wants more developers, web designers and software programmers, to become familiar with the browser and keep it in mind when building web sites. It's rather annoying to come across a site that only works with Internet Explorer. On a Windows PC, you can switch browsers, but on the iPhone (starting at $499) there is only Safari.
I downloaded and ran it in Windows XP Professional. It looks very similar to it's Mac OS X sibling. Apple's biggest claim is that it is so much faster, but I could not really tell. Network speed is a bigger factor in how fast a page appears. However, I do use Safri often on my G4 Mac, because it is much faster than Firefox. While it has some some nice features (such as the find feature, bookmarks manager and RSS reader) and a minimalistic interface I do not know how well it is going to compete against Firefox on Windows with it's open architecture which allows for a wide variety of extensions. However, I just read that iTunes gets downloaded a million times a day and that there are 500 million users worldwide, so if Apple can get a fraction of them to adopt Safari they will be making some headway.
If you are a web designer you should definitely install it and add it to your collection of browsers to test your pages against - I hope that you do that. Also, I guess if you are in the market for the iPhone, you'll want to download it, too. Web developers can tell what browsers visitors to their web sites are using, so the more people that are using it, the more that they willl take it into consideration when designing their web sites.
In addition to promoting Safari, Apple touted additional features in Leopard (the next version of the Mac operating system) which will be released in the Fall. The new features include improvements to Finder (finally) and the desktop. Finder is looking more like iTunes and the Quick Look will be a time saver. Even though Microsoft spent 5 years on Vista, OS X is still going to inspire envy in Windows users. The Apple web site has been redesigned as well.
While Apple has updated Safari, Camino 1.5 from Mozilla has been released. Camino is a cousin to Firefox that uses the native OS X interface and therefore runs faster than Firefox. It uses the same Gecko HTML rendering engine, but does not support Firefox's extensions. Still it is a nice browser to use and with this latest update it is now pretty much on par with Safari, as far as, spell checking, RSS notification and use of tabs. The newly redesigned Camino web site is very nice, too. I love the flash graphic they use to highlight the new features which goes to show you the high level of professionalism that is now a part of free open source software.