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Making the surprise announcement at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference last night, Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered little in the way of explanation, concentrating instead on the benefits that Safari provides.

Safari has always been the fastest browser on the Mac and now it's the fastest browser on Windows, loading and drawing Web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2,' he said, citing industry standard iBench tests.

'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. 'Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari's superior browsing experience too.'

To Mac users, Safari will be largely familiar, save for a handful of additional preferences and the principle new feature, the ability to drag and rearrange tabs.

Windows users will be introduced to full support for open Internet standards, one-click access to an initial search query, resizable text

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fields; and private browsing, an option that ensures an user's browsing history is not stored.

Apple's VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller explained that the decision to port Safari was simply to broaden Apple's appeal.

'The more people who like our applications, the more it might mean they'll buy other products from us,' he said. Tim Bajarin, an analyst at technology consultancy Creative Strategies, agreed.

'Safari is another Trojan horse that introduces an innovation of Apple to the Windows community and entices them to the Mac platform,' he said.

Money might also have been a factor. According to the New York Times, Mozilla makes $100 million each year from the deal that makes Google the default search engine in Firefox. If Apple has a similar deal, then it could already be making in excess of $25-$30 million, given the relative browser market shares.

The free public beta of Safari 3 is available from apple.com/safari. The final version of Safari 3 will be available in October, when OS X 10.5 Leopard is scheduled for release

Safari 3 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 or later, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 3 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 25 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500MHz Intel Pentium processor.