Yesterday at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced that Safari 3 will be made available for Windows XP and Vista.

With a market share of only 5% (according to Apple) he’s been falling behind on the browser scene. Now he’s ready to pick up the fight with IE, FF and Opera.

The Public Beta version of Safari 3 is available for immediate download for both Mac OS X and Windows.

During the conference Jobs demonstrated how Safari stands out from the crowd as being blistering fast. According to Apple’s own test run Safari loads web pages 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, twice as fast as IE7 and 3 times faster than Opera. It also ran JavaScripts and web applications quicker and rendered HTML the best.

However, testing performed by others indicate that we should wait for a more objective conclusion, and maybe even wait for the initial non-beta release. Right now the bookmarking feature will make the browser crash unexpectedly, and some major websites has been reported as “not displayed correctly” meaning the navigation etc. being invisible. To their defence Safari 3 is equipped with a bug-report button which would allow for fast and easy reporting (and hopefully updates).

Compared to previous Safari versions there’s also been some improvements to the Tab feature and by pressing Ctrl + F (page search) your page search results are displayed beautifully. Besides that nothing much has come from Apple regarding what’s under the hood. The final release is expected in October along with the next main OS update from Apple, namely Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

For all developers and designers working on Windows this new release is what we’ve been waiting for for ages. Having the possibility to test projects in all browsers from one platform/OS/PC makes life a little bit easier. This was actually the first time I’ve seen my blog through Safari and it appears to be okay…