Safari: 1 million and counting


Apple has announced that more than 1 million copies of its new Safari web browser have been downloaded since the free public beta was posted on Jan 7.

"Safari is a home run, with over a million downloads in less than two weeks," said his Steveness. "Mac users have discovered that Safari beta release is already the fastest browser on the Mac and possibly the best browser in the world."

According to the mothership's PR on the subject, "Safari is the fastest browser ever created for the Mac and one of the most innovative and easiest to use browsers on any platform."

Safari's rendering engine loads pages over three times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and runs Javascript over twice as fast. Safari's innovative features include Google search capabilities integrated directly into the toolbar; SnapBack, a new way to instantly snap back up to search results or the top level of any website after browsing down one or more levels; a completely new way to name, organize and present bookmarks; and automatic "pop-up" ad blocking.

The Safari public beta requires X.2 and is optimized for X.2.3. Safari is a compact 3MB download that occupies only 7.1MB of hard drive space. The final version of Safari will be made available later in 2003.

Editor's note: That it's the fastest, etc, etc browser for the Mac can easily be questioned as Chimera and OmniWeb both offer speed as well as a number of features yet to make into Apple's KHTML and KJS-based app. However, with the ever-buggy, kludgey IE now gone from my system, I have to say that Safari is a good thing -- it's the best thing to happen to my Mac since X.