It’s always based on an ‘Intel’ open source engine, and Macs are pretty much PC’s nowadays in terms of hardware. My guess is that technically, nothing has been keeping Apple from releasing a Windows version of Safari for years. And now they have. I for one am glad, as Safari is highly standards-compliant and might lure more people away from Internet Explorer. Competition is good, and if the PC version of Safari is anything like the Mac version I’m pretty sure people will like it.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

First impressions:

• Looks exactly the same as it does on a mac. Personally I do not like this. Discussions about aesthetics aside, I feel it should look like all my other Vista apps for the sake of coherence.
• Safari’s anti-aliasing algorithm renders fonts far bolder than Vista’s ClearType technology. Personally, I prefer Vista’s approach. Fortunately, you can set the thickness from ‘medium’ to ‘light’ in the prefs if you like.
• It might be a beta, but it feels pretty solid. And fast.
• At least now us Windows designers have a chance to preview sites in Safari’s render engine and make screenshots with mac Aqua style from elements.
• No extension. I was about to go look for something to display the current page’s PageRank when I realized that only FireFox has extension. If only for this reason I won’t be switching any time soon.

The installer bugged me about installing Quicktime, iTunes and some Apple update tool, so be careful not to click ‘next’ without unchecking the right boxes. Unlike QuickTime, it does not add itself to your system tray and quick launch without asking. Based on my experiences with other Apple software I was kind of expecting it to set itself to be my default browser, but apparently Apple has finally realized that stuff like that ticks users off.

[UPDATE]
At work on a brand new E6300 Dell PC running XP it’s utter crap. Apparently it does not render titles and certain types of links, the bookmark toolbar is empty and it crashes when I go to Apple’s support site. None of this happened when I was testing it at home on Vista. Looks like in it’s current state it’s unusable on the XP box.