What is Apple Hunting For?

At first sight, news that Apple has released a Windows version of its Safari browser seems fairly ho-hum: it is hardly going to make any more of a dent in Internet Explorer's market share than Firefox already is. Nor is it truly cross-platform like Firefox. It seems likely that the move is to bolster Safari as a platform, since it will form a key part of the imminent iPhone.

But in fact this represents a win for both open standards and open source. Safari is based on Konqueror's KHTML engine; as such, it will help push Web standards, which in turn can only make things easier for Firefox. And anything that helps buck up the browser market, which is beginning to flag again after the excitement of Firefox's earlier irruption, is certainly welcome.