Apple touts Safari for Windows and iPhone

Apple plans to ship a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows, and third-party developers will be able to get a piece of the iPhone, the company announced on Monday.

A beta version of Safari for Windows is available now, chief executive Steve Jobs announced during his keynote speech at the company's 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari will also allow Web developers to create applications for the iPhone using common Web development standards that can interact with the rest of the applications that will ship with the iPhone.

Jobs previewed several features that will be shipped with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, which is due in October for $129 (£66). But the Safari news was unexpected -- the software became available on Monday on Apple's Web site for Windows users as a free beta version.

Apple has only a 5 per cent share of the browser market, behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, but Jobs reckons that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application.

The new version, Safari 3, is also the key to allowing application developers to create third-party applications for the hotly anticipated iPhone, which is set to go on sale at in the US at 6pm on 29 June, Jobs announced (an Apple representative could not immediately confirm whether that was 6pm Pacific time or Eastern time, or whether it would be a rolling launch). The pitch is that developers can create Web applications using Web 2.0 standards like Ajax that will work just as well as applications that Apple has written natively for the iPhone.

Applications designed with the iPhone in mind will run in a Safari browser on the phone with hooks into other applications, such as voice calling, email and Google Maps.

Scott Forstall, vice president of iPhone software development, demonstrated a sample application that Apple built to access contacts in a corporate database. Clicking on a phone number in a contact record, for example, would automatically dial that contact.

This gives application developers a path to the iPhone, but it falls short of the software development kit that some were hoping for that would allow developers to create native applications for the iPhone.

Jobs devoted the majority of his talk to Leopard, which was originally supposed to be available around the time of this week's WWDC but was delayed until October so that Apple could get the iPhone out on time. He showed off ten features of Leopard that set to be additions to the operating system, including some that have been shown over the past year, such as Time Machine, Cover Flow and Boot Camp.

"We believe the Leopard features highlighted today will serve to further differentiate Macs and will help catalyze market share gains," Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, wrote in a research report distributed after Jobs' speech.