Safari 3.1 managed to beat both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8 to the market. The alien Windows browser, thrown on the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows XP after it was migrated out of the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard heaven, was finalized ahead of its rivals and released for download. At the same time, Mozilla only reached Beta 4 stage with Firefox 3.0 in March 2008, despite the fact that it initially planned to deliver the next iteration of its open source browser by the end of 2007. On March 5, Microsoft made available for download the first beta of Internet Explorer 8, the successor of IE7.

Described as "blazingly fast" by Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, the performance of Safari 3.1, a March 2008 product, was compared with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0, both browsers released at the end of 2006, over a year and a half ago. Apple has managed to successfully avoid comparing Safari 3.1 with the more recent Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, available also as of this month. In this context, the fact that Apple claims that Safari 3.1 delivers superior web page loading times, as well as JavaScript, is as irrelevant as putting the "world's fastest/best web browser for Mac and Windows PCs" label on the product. The Cupertino company only managed to prove that its latest 2008 version of Safari is better than what Microsoft and Mozilla were offering all the way in 2006. And not by much...

"Apple today introduced Safari 3.1, the world's fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs. Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers," Apple stated in a press release announcing the browser.

Apple initially released Safari 3 into public beta on June 11, 2007, but despite rushing to applaud the fact that the browser passed the 1-million-download milestone in the first 48 hours, the product failed to appeal to users and is now at just 4.56% of the market, according to Net Applications. At the same time, despite the fact that Apple is touting advanced web standards support including HTML 5 and CSS Animations, Safari 3.1 still fails the Acid3 test.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is available for download here.
More on Safari 3.1 here.