Well, If you're already comfy and feeling like a "web Browser isn't one of my problems", I'll suggest you reconsider your position.

Apples CEO, Steve Jobs, has just declared war. Apple has shown in a such short space of time that they you can't just ignore them. Apple's innovations many times appear to come be from a beyond, some sort of extra-terrestrial intelligence appears to inform all their technologies. Just when the world is still reeling from the ipod dazzle, the company stunned us, the more, with its mouth-watering iphone. Now we know that when Steve Jobs speaks three things happen: the world listens because we all know that whatever is going to be the outcome is certainly going to be beyond the hype, then we start guessing and at the same time rival companies start shivering. So when Apple announced on Tuesday that they were introducing Safari 3.1, claiming it to be the world';s fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs. The world stopped to pay attention.

Up until June 2007, the Safari browser did not have a Windows compatible version however it appears that the disregard for Windows users has been more than made up for, this time. Just check this out: Safari 3.1 loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers and is the first browser to support the latest innovative web standards needed to deliver the next generation of highly interactive Web 2.0 experiences.

Wow! How I reeled. From my iphone experience the first thing that I was looking out for, after I downloaded and installed Safari, was the user interface and words could not describe my feeling. It was clear that the browser wars had just begun.

Safari 3.1 features an unusually appealing user interface, while the browser may be scored average for its lack-luster grey interface, the motion they exude are reminiscent of the stop motion effects you cherish in films like the matrix, and 300. Create a new bookmark for instance and the dialog pane slides in almost perpendicularly to you. Also page elements such as form and even text are not left out, you’ll find form fields taking on a glass-button like appearance and text appearing much richer. While showing off my new acquisition to my colleague, we tried out the find function (Control-F) and the search box appeared at the top right of the page, as I entered the first letter of my search query in the field, an alpha-transparent blanket appeared and spread across the page highlighting the letter typed, on finding the word the highlight changed into a throbbing yellowish highlight, Impressive.

Scalability? Yes Safari really scales. On the speed level, it was great. As a rule of thumb I never browse espn soccernet at home because of my poor internet connection which takes ages to load the page site. But this rule was defied by Safari. I tried opening the site on Safari 3.1, Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 at the same time and the result was amazing. While the other browsers dragged, Safari had already loaded the page completely, don’t ask me how but I suspect like I said earlier, extra-terrestrial intelligence. An added advantage for you, who wants a faster browsing experience but wait a second, who doesn’t?

Still on the need for speed, Safari 3.1 also offers, for the first time, client-side storage in the form of an SQLite database. This means, for instance, that a Web-based application such as a word processor or image editor could gain the capability to store documents on your hard drive, which would result in faster performance and possibly the option to use the Web-based applications even when your computer is offline.

The list goes on, Safari has also been upgraded to be fully standards compliant. Safari 3.1 scores a 75 on Acid 3 test, compared with a 53 on Firefox 2.0.0.12, a 40 on Opera, and a paltry 12 on IE7. Also support for CSS Web fonts and animations, it improves existing support for SVG (scalable vector gaphics) and HTML 5 and Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing adds “… best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video, and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

That’s not to say that there are no short comings. The absence of a 'new tab' button remains an issue, Control-T remains the fastest way to open a new blank tab (but you can also double click on the tab bar to get a new tab). Also support for extensions remain an issue however when you run the install, it will extract your plug-ins from Firefox, if you already have that browser installed - a nice gesture that's possible because Safari uses the same plug-in format. This can save you another trip to Adobe's site to download Flash Player and Reader. This does not mean that you can install Firefox extensions; only plug-ins for playing file formats such as Flash and QuickTime are extracted. But most annoying of all these cons is that you’re not able to view the properties of an image on a page, right-clicking an image gives you the option of saving or opening in a new tab but embarrassingly, no image properties option is provided. Apple needs to fix all these if it wants to accomplish something with this browser on Windows.

It’s clearly beyond doubt now that Apple is gunning for 100% market share on Windows. It's now a real contender. The world has stopped guessing, Firefox and IE have been caught on the back foot. Indeed the browser wars is heating up but at the end of the day it’s the users who’ll benefit from the spoils.