Apple has released a version of its Safari browser for Windows... OK, so?

At the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference today, Steve Jobs hit the stage to do what Steve Jobs does at these events: make an array of announcements about new things coming from Apple.

Safari for Windows

Not unexpectedly, there was lots of news about Leopard, and new gaming initiatives for the Mac, and of course the iPhone.

Apparently this year's "one more thing" was the announcement that Apple would be offering a version of their Safari browser for Windows.

Am I jaded or biased for thinking "So what, big deal?"

Internet Explorer still maintains the lion's share of the browser market on Windows, but for those who are sick of the security holes in IE 6 (or the annoying incompatibilities in IE 7), there are plenty of viable alternatives.

My choice has for a long time now been Firefox. It supports tabbed browsing and a flexible architecture that has enabled the creation of a huge number of add-ons and extensions that do everything from batching downloads to providing extensive support for web developers to test and validate their pages. And... it runs the same way on a Mac as it does on a Windows PC. (There's also Opera, which provides a "mini" version that works quite nicely on many non-iPhone mobile devices.)

I moved away from Safari pretty early and switched to Firefox on the Mac. This way, my browsing environment is the same no matter which machine I'm using. Safari has its share of quirks that irk both users and page designers (some AJAX tricks don't work in Safari, and Apple has been slow in responding to requests to update it to make them work).

My question is: what does Safari offer that other alternative browsers don't? An Apple logo?

Safari really doesn't offer much to Windows users that they either haven't sought out and gotten already (the 15-20% who've moved to other browsers) or that they just didn't care about in the first place. Considering that the vast majority of Windows users are fat, dumb, and happy with IE, choosing not to believe that's it's desirable (or even possible) to install a better browser than the one they're stuck wi... I mean blessed with by Microsoft.

Walt Mossberg recently referred to iTunes as a brilliant sneak attack by Apple to offer Windows users what amounts to "the most subversive piece of software" on their computers.

I just don't see Safari being similarly insidious and subversive. But perhaps I'll be proven wrong here and find every Windows user clamoring for a copy of Safari.