WWDC brought us the latest Leopard previews, those everyone expected. What took people by surprise was the Safari announcement. Starting today, Apple is letting people test the latest version of Safari both on Macs and PCs.

Mac users are well familiar with Safari, and this latest version brings numerous improvements, both in terms of speed and in terms of features. Windows users on the other hand have not had much contact with Apple's applications beyond iTunes, and this release marks an important step. Safari joins iTunes in delivering Apple's legendary user experience to both Windows and Mac users, as well as full support of open Internet standards.

"We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, in the press release. "Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari's superior browsing experience too."

Safari loads and draws web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2. The speed of Safari combined with its intuitive user interface lets users spend more time surfing the web and less time waiting for pages to load. Other Safari features now available to Windows users include SnapBack, one-click access to an initial search query, resizable text fields and private browsing to ensure that information about an individual's browsing history isn't stored.

Safari 3 supports all modern Internet standards so users can view websites as they were meant to be seen, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java. Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple's Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.