Apparently Apple's Safari web browser is greatly improving on Windows. They've released version 3.1 which is no longer a beta, and it looks to be much better in terms of memory usage and supported features.

Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows. Along with the Mac version, 3.1 brings support for CSS Web fonts and animations, and improves existing support for SVG and HTML 5. There are also a handful of performance and stability improvements rolled into the release, as well.

Compliance without stability is pointless, however. Fortunately, Safari 3.1 for Windows is now a stable, usable web browser. We couldn't say that about Safari on Windows before, but now that we've been testing it for a few days, we can tell you this: it's a night and day difference to the beta we saw last summer. I've had one crash in two days, and others in the lab report similar results (and there is a building consensus that the problem is caused by Flash). That puts it on the same stability level as the other major Windows browsers.

Memory usage is good, too. Safari uses about the same amount of memory as Firefox, pre-memory leak. That is, Safari and Firefox have similar memory footprints at startup, but after you use both for several hours, they start to diverge. Firefox's notorious problems with memory leaks are to blame, so Safari ends up using 25 to 50 percent less memory, keeping it from getting sluggish and unstable. This is something we expect to see greatly improved with Firefox 3.0.

However, many are choosing to ignore the release because Apple was crappy in how they tried to increase the Safari userbase in Windows. iTunes comes with a product updater that checks for updates for itself and Quicktime, which comes bundled with iTunes. But the updater tries to push out the new version of Safari to you, and the option is checked by default. So unsuspecting users could easily end up installing another browser without knowing it. First off, a new product or update for a separate product shouldn't be going out through the updater that got installed with iTunes only. And secondly, if they did want to put it in there, it should be optional and unchecked by default.

All that said, I may give it a spin just to see how it performs, and also for use in checking browser compatibility with this website. And perhaps the most important question is: Will this oust Mozilla Firefox from the throne of "Best Web Browser in the World"?