Say Goodbye to That 0.74% Browser Market Share, Opera

We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people that say iTunes is their favorite app on Windows. … It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, All Things Digital 5, May 30, 2007

Apple CEO Steve Jobs handed Windows’ users another refreshing glass of cold water at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference today in San Francisco, announcing a new version of its Safari Web browser that runs on the Microsoft operating system. “There are now more than 18 million Safari users,” Jobs said. “And if you look at Safari’s market share, it has climbed from 0% to 5% across the entire Internet. But we want to grow, and in order to do that we have to create a version of Safari for Windows. And that’s exactly what we have done. So what we’ve got now is the most innovative browser in the world and the fastest browser on Windows.”

For the Mac faithful, who have spent the past few months hyperactively speculating on the wondrous new products that might come out of this year’s WWDC, today must have been quite a letdown. No MacBook mini. No secret features from OS X Leopard (which seems to be shaping up quite nicely, by the way). Not even an overhaul of the company’s .Mac service that last week seemed almost a sure thing. Just Safari 3. For Windows. Beta. “Overall, it was a disappointment,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Indeed. Although to be fair, it could prove important in the future. Jobs said Safari 3 will allow Apple to open up the iPhone to outside developers without compromising on security or reliability. Apple is essentially using it as a platform for outside companies to write software applications for the iPhone. “There are whole companies building applications this way, like Salesforce.com and Google,” he said. “This is a very modern way to build applications, and we think it’s going to be awesome on the iPhone.”