A big bite of Apple

Though not, strictly speaking, CRM news, a few announcements from Apple this week have made waves across all the software industries thus far. (And it’s only Wednesday.)

The biggest of the big deals, of course, was Apple’s introduction of Safari for Windows. Safari 3 was introduced at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco and is touted as “the fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.”

Safari 3 is promised to support all modern internet standards, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java. Safari software updates are delivered through Apple’s Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.

Safari was noted as just the second product – after iTunes – to deliver the Apple user experience to Windows and Mac users along with full support of open Internet standards.

The mention isn’t merely frivolous, either; judging from Steve Jobs’ introductory talking up of the product in a keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference, it seems Apple wants this bad boy to ride iTunes’ coattails for a bit.

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Jobs. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience, too.”

Jobs figures that there are currently about 18.6 million Safari users, leading one more-than-slightly sycophantic blogger to extrapolate that “we’re looking at 100 million or more Safari users within 30 months.”

(The entry continues along the lines of “Steve Jobs, by releasing Safari to Windows, has laid the foundation for the next major computing platform which will be Web-based, built for Safari, mobile, and Apple’s. … The big question is what, if anything … can Microsoft do to effectively respond to this massive threat?” Sheesh.)

Safari 3 public beta is available today as a free download at apple.com. The final version of Safari 3 will be available as a feature in the upcoming Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, and will be available as a free download to Mac OS X Tiger and Windows users in October.

Safari 3 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 or later, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 3 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.