Apple releases Safari 3 for Windows

Gargoyle (Gargoyle) In a bid to increase Safari's market share, Apple has released Safari for Windows XP and Vista.

June 11, 2007 3:52 PM ET in News, ,

In his keynote speech today at WWDC, Steve Jobs celebrated Safari’s rise from 0% to 5% market share in the last four years. Still, at only 5%, Safari is far behind IE’s market share at 78%, and even Firefox’s at 15%. Healthy figures considering Mac hardware makes up an even smaller percentage of the global computer market, though.

To increase Safari’s piece of Internet pie, Jobs announced today that Safari has been released for Windows XP and Vista. My initial reaction, having not touched a Mac since junior high school, was “neat, but so what?” How dare I underestimate his Steveness. He brought slides, people. With charts. These very charts claimed that Safari runs considerably faster on Windows than both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

According to iBench performance suite, Safari on Windows was over twice as fast as Internet Explorer, and roughly 1.6x as fast as Firefox. JavaScript performance was even better.

I’m not about to Switch, but I might just test the water a little. After all, that’s how I first started to appreciate the alternatives to Internet Explorer. How about you? You can get Safari for Windows or Mac at the Safari 3 beta page.

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8 Comments:

  1. primesuspect
    11 Jun '07, 4:02 pm

    I tried it today, and encountered rendering errors on two very important sites. Admittedly, the errors are probably due to lazy programming and/or bad code, and not the browser's fault - but it is the experience that matters in the end.

    Safari is definitely faster than firefox. I noticed it right away.

  2. Buddy J
    11 Jun '07, 4:21 pm

    OMG, slides! WITH CHARTS!

    I'll try it, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna like it. The first thing I did when I got my Mac was drop Safari for Firefox. I guess I could give it a chance, but only because he had charts.

  3. kryyst
    12 Jun '07, 7:52 am

    It's non-news really. Almost every mac user I know, self included ditches Safari for Firefox. It's not that safari is bad in it's own right, in fact I actually prefer the way it looks over firefox. But I can't go without my firefox pluggins. Safari has some pluggins but they are either hacked on or worse you have to pay for them. That's just lame. Granted one potential benefit is that if by some freak shoot safari does get a windows crowd more pluggins may come out for it.

  4. Buddy J
    12 Jun '07, 10:12 am

    In on Safari right now. Sweet mother it's fast. I'm gonna try it today to see how well it works for me.

  5. Gargoyle
    14 Jun '07, 3:01 pm

    Safari 3.0.1 has been released, which includes some security fixes. Details here.

  6. muddocktor
    14 Jun '07, 6:01 pm

    I put it on 1 rig here at the house and I found it to be kind of ugly myself. That ugly fat font they use........ewwwww!

  7. Buddy J
    14 Jun '07, 10:05 pm

    It's not the font, really. It's that they anti-alias the fonts. You can minimize the impact through the settings window, but you can't seem to turn it off completely.

  8. airbornflght
    14 Jun '07, 10:51 pm

    I love the text rendering in safari. but I decided I like ff better.

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