Apple’s Safari may be the rocking browser for Mac users, but only 4.04 percent Internet surfer use Safari while Firefox 2.x takes the third spot with 10.02 percent and IE7 occupy spot two followed by its predecessor IE6 at the top with a blistering 46.76 percent share (Statistics provided by Net Applications ). Even the web developers using Mac doesn’t hassle to check if their pages work with Safari unless their target market is particularly Mac oriented. So as you can see Safari remains as an underdog in browser war. Only Mac users were in love with it, deducting those who are addicted to Firefox.

So why is it the new Safari 3 Public beta released for Windows as well, it’s not that windows needed another browser, since I don’t see any exceptional features that isn’t available in other windows browsers. What’s the catch? The catch is gaining “browser share”. Though Microsoft IE6 and IE7 is way out of grasp for Safari, but Mozilla Firefox is well within the range. Let me explain why? First of all Macbooks and Macbook Pros are gaining quite a popularities among corporate users as well as hobbyist web surfer and bloggers, and you don’t need a calculator to figure out how this increasing Safari “web share” . Second Apple’s upcoming magic phone iPhone, which uses Safari as its web browser but initially Web 2.0 applications will be the only way non-Apple developers can get their software onto the iPhone. That means the developers will be very kin to test their application on safari in order to be ready for the iPhone’s release at the end of this month. If there wouldn’t be any Safari for windows, very few of those developers will bother to build application for iphone.

It’s highly unlikely that developers will fly out and by a Macbook, just because they want their applications to be ready for iphone. Installing a pre-release copy of the Windows version is much more logical, if he/she isn’t a Mac user already. Now check this out situation one (Macbook popularities) is giving Safari nearly 3-5 percent web share, and situation two (iPhone and Safari for windows) would give at least 3-4% web share. So total 6-9% web share gain, which is enough to have a head to head battle with Firefox. Unless off course Mozilla Firefox gain a popularity boost, Which they will as upcoming Firefox 3 is looking great.

Now question is which cross platform browser will stand next to Microsoft’s IE in the chart of “browser share”?