by , 3:30 PM EST, January 10th, 2003
Apple has announced that downloads for Safari have topped 500,000 copies. Safari is Apple's new Mac-only browser based on the KHTML open source rendering engine. The browser was released as a public beta on Tuesday, after Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address, and is available for free from Apple's Web site. The download levels of Safari so far mean that more than 150,000 copies per day have been making their way to Macs around the world. On Wednesday, Phil Schiller announced during his Expo keynote address that some 300,000 copies had already been downloaded (see TMO's coverage for more information on Mr. Schiller's keynote). From Apple:
Apple® today announced that users have downloaded more than 500,000 copies of its new Safari™ web browser since the free public beta was posted on Apple's web site on Tuesday, January 7.
The Safari public beta is available immediately for free download at www.apple.com/safari, requires Mac® OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" and is optimized for Mac OS X v10.2.3. 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.
Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: eMac™, iMac®, iBook®, Power Macintosh® G3, Power Mac® G4 and any PowerBook® introduced after May 1998.
You can find more information on Safari, as well as download links, at Apple's Safari Web site.
It is going to be very interesting to see what Apple does with this product, especially considering how popular browsers like Chimera and OmniWeb have been. There are more Mac browser options today than there has ever been before, and that means that Apple will have to stay on its toes if it wants Mac users to embrace Safari. That works out for all of us in the end.