Apple has announced it is developing a Windows version of its Safari browser.  The browser will be freely available for Windows in October 2007.  This is good. Safari has demonstrated its many qualities on the Mac. It is a fast and reliable browser, maybe just lacking the range of extensions that Firefox has.
More competition in the Windows world is always welcome, if only to prevent overall market dominance from happening.

I tried Beta 3 of Safari for Windows this morning on my office computer. The good news first.  I was pleasantly surprised by the speed at with it launched, compared to Firefox or Internet Explorer. According to Apple, it beats all the competitors for speed of HTML rendering, Javascript execution and launch times.

As is typical with beta versions, some things do not work yet.

• Importing Firefox bookmarks. I have not tried importing IE bookmarks
• Although Safari identified my company’s automatic proxy, the keychain module in the browser does not seem to work yet, so I had to enter a user name and password for each and  every HTTP connection. You may have several for each page you want to display, so in this case it is very inconvenient.
• The user interface is typical MacOSX. This may be surprising for Windows users, especially in the preferences menu, where there is no “OK” or “Apply” button to confirm the changes you made.

Overall, Safari for Windows is very promising. I look forward for the next beta and the official release in October.