Safari sneaks its way on to Windows

For a long time I’ve wondered why Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer for the Mac. It’s not that I like IE (it’s probably my least favorite browser), it’s that intentionally restricting the market for a something that taps into the one truly cross-everything platform (the web) is kind of a dumb idea.

Which is why I was also surprised that Safari, Apple’s native browser–which really is a pretty good browswer–wasn’t available for the PC. It seems to me that, just like iTunes, Safari was well suited to float effortlessly onto the desktops of millions of windows users.

Well now the Safari 3 beta is for Windows, too.

Interestingly enough, they have an XP background on their big screenshot instead of a Vista background. I assume, however, that the browser works on both.

Two years ago, this would have been brilliant. Now it’s only halfway brilliant. All the tech-minded people who would have grabbed Safari for the speed and the features are probably, like me, completely attached to Firefox because of the extensions.

And the average “dumb it down” user isn’t going to look much beyond IE7 because it comes with windows and it works. I know this because of how long people kept using IE6.

Still, it will be interesting to see how far it spreads.

[ ps. Probably not very fast as long as it is full of bugs. ]