At the WWDC Apple today released released Safari for Windows XP and Vista in it’s first public beta, and I just had to try it. After having installed on my Vista machine, I installed some of the plugins reported to work with the browser. Let us sum it up like this, of course I didn’t install JAVA and Real Player plugins!

I noted the speed results that Steve Jobs presented at the developer conference. They were under XP, and I must say that Safari is everything but fast under Vista. It was even slugish on MacOS X 10.4. After having run it for two hours, I find it to be quite so unstable in it’s current state. I have experienced several crashes, and found a few pages that don’t work well, one is for instance Skype. Clicking the Bookmarks button made the browser crash. Well, I guess that’s why Apple is calling it a beta. But what I found great was that Safari 3.o worked well with my WordPress installation, as it now supports visual posting.

I guess Apple will succeed with the browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, of course, dominates the Web browser market, although Mozilla Firefox has made significant headway in recent years. Apple will with this move get quite a bit higher market share then their 5 % today for the Safari. But I guess that Microsoft will notice little to that. Internet Explorer 7 is, in the way it is integrated in Vista, the most secure browser for Windows. For me it is probably Firefox that will go out, it is to bloated. But I am most concerned for the Opera browser on the desktop. Will there be a market for the desktop version of the browser when Safari for Windows hits 3.0 (and stable)? I sadly doubt it, and I am pretty sure that Opera Software ASA is the big looser in the browser war. Apple has something that Opera doesn’t have, other cool applications in iTunes and QuickTime, but more importantly the iPods and Apple TV.

Safari browser