Interested in running Safari on Windows? Now you can! Apple is launching a Windows version of Safari, the flagship browser that's bundled with MacOS X. The software can be downloaded from this page, and Apple claims most of the same benefits as the Mac version: fast rendering speed, clean user interface, built-in RSS feed support, pop-up blocking, and so on. Safari for Windows boasts very much the same user interface as its MacOS X counterpart, which gives it a very non-standard feel in Windows. There is no minimize effect in Vista, the browser window has no edges to grab onto, and features like auto-scroll don't work. Font rendering is also Adobe Reader-like and doesn't seem to use the standard Windows ClearType antialiasing. Nonetheless, the browser is quite fast: it seems to be a few seconds faster at loading the TechAmok or GGMania front page than both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0. If Apple makes its user interface more complaint to Windows UI standards, this browser may very well catch on.

Update: Security researcher Aviv Raff claims to have found the first security vulnerability in Apple's Safari browser on Windows only hours after the software was released. Raff tested the application against a standard browser security testing tool. "A first glance at the debugger showed me that this memory corruption might be exploitable. Although I'll have to dig more to be sure of that," he wrote on his blog.

Update: Apple has released Safari 3.0.1 for Windows. The updated version supposedly fixes the handful of flaws that were found just hours after the public beta was released.