Just when you thought the browser market was crowded enough, along comes Safari for Windows. Safari's current market share is pitifully low at around 3%.

This is mainly due to Safari only ever being available on the Macintosh platform (until now) which is also at the lower end of the market sitting on less than 5% of desktops. The port to Windows will undoubtedly see the browser climb steadily.

Apple's Safari page boldly boasts faster HTML rendering, faster javascript performance and faster launch times. After a fresh install, Safari crashed for me on first launch, and every other attempt since. A work colleague also experienced exactly the same problem on a Windows XP machine.

Not a great start - 2 completely different machines and 2 different operating systems yet the exact same problem. I installed it on another machine here (Windows XP) and Safari fell over before it even got up again. Reports are starting to appear if the same problem, and some people have complained of a memory leak, with the browser nabbing more than 200mb of memory, a similar fate experienced in the early days of Firefox. To be fair this is a beta product and no doubt the issue will be sorted at version 1.

I am all in favour of having a wide range of choices, but as a web developer who is an obsessive compulsive W3C standards 'disorder', it is exceedingly difficult to get web pages to render correctly across all browsers exactly the same. Just about every headache or late night I have been up has been due to Internet Explorer's well documented pathetic standards support. Luckily Safari has very good standards support, so my job won't be that much harder if at all.

Download Safari for Windows.