Apple starts Windows browser war

ON STAGE AT APPLE'S Developer Conference yesterday, Steve Jobs revealed a product no one saw coming - Safari for Windows.

Apple's web browser enjoys the vast majority of share on the Mac, and given the success of Itunes, Jobs' mob are obviously hoping that another high profile Windows app will draw attention to the Mac platform.

However, it's not all good. Itunes is a notoriously memory hungry application, and some users are reporting that Safari on Vista can use up to 150MB of memory - a stonking amount. Further, there are flaws everywhere - bugs have been found by David Maynor, the chap who programmed the Airport hack, and also by Thor Larholm, who found a couple of 0-day exploits.

That's not good news for Apple, who will shout 'beta!' back at anyone complaining, we're sure.

Safari is built on top of KHTML, from the KDE project and will compete with Firefox for Windows web share against Internet Explorer. Apple claims that the browser is far faster than its competitors, and also easier to use. µ