The big shocker at the Worldwide Developers Conference was Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs announcement that Safari (the browser used by Mac users for years) is being released for Windows. For you daring types, the beta is available for download now.

First impressions from a Windows user’s perspective:

1. Slow, slow, slow!!! In his announcement, Jobs said that Safari on Windows XP is twice as fast as IE. I ran it in side-by-side simultaneous comparisons and found that IE6 on Windows XP is over twice as fast as Safari.
2. The install tried to put QuickTime into my boot sequence not once, but twice. Thankfully, I am running StartupMonitor and was able to stop it.
3. Most sites work well (mine, for instance). I can watch videos on YouTube (like the one of Bush making his way through a wildly-cheering Albanian crowd), digg articles on Digg (like the story about studies that confirm that the death penalty deters crime) and look at the cool street view on Google Maps (like the guy breaking in or making his escape in SF).
4. Some don’t work so well. Although I haven’t found anything in the public sphere in my ten minutes of surfing, our it screws up some elements of the display on our company’s internal portal: inconsistent buttons and panes that are listed one after another rather than appearing side-by-side.
5. A couple of slightly irritating bugs, to be expected in beta software. For instance, if the window is maximized on my primary display I can no longer drop down and get my task bar to come up (it’s on auto-hide). Weirder is when I try to maximize the browser on my secondary display (I run side-by-side monitors) and Safari suddenly disappears! The only way to find it again is to right click on it in the task bar, choose “Move” and arrow the guy back onto the screen. It jumps left so far that it goes right off the display!
6. YouTube videos embedded in posts that I view in Google Reader don’t show.
7. The Google search works (yeah, I’m still number one when searching for “rousseauian“)
8. The flat gray look is boring, although I rather like the pretty blue thingies in the scroll bar.
9. It locked up every time I tried to log on to my Gmail account.
10. Did I mention that it is god-awful slow?

Still, it’s a pretty solid start. I’ve had more trouble with some “production” software, so you have to give Apple kudos for that.

What I don’t understand is Job’s reference to gaining “market share” in the browser market. Is there “market share” for something that’s free? Wouldn’t gaining “user base” be more accurate?

Update: Errate Security found 6 bugs (4 DoS and 2 remote code execution) in the first afternoon of fiddling with Safari, and was able to weaponize one of them. Click over to see links to others that have found bugs as well, including a different weaponized security hole. [HT to Slashdot]