Apple put its Safari browser on Windows, a browser that isn't even supposed to be the best browser for the Mac. Immediately the move was cast as a reprise of the browser wars and by jingo within 48 hours Apple was reporting more than a million downloads. Safari has previously had 5% market share.

Apple claims the Safari 3 rev can render web pages twice as fast as IE7 and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

It has bookmarks, tabs, a built-in RSS reader and private browsing to ensure information about the user's browsing history isn't stored.

The free public beta is at www.apple.com/safari. The final version, also free, will be available in October.

It works on XP and Vista and required a minimum 256MB of memory and at least a 500MHz Pentium processor. Performance depends on one's configuration.

The iPhone is also supposed to run Safari, meaning that a third-party application designed to run on Safari would run on the pricey little gadget, due to be released on June 29 and retail exclusively through AT&T.

Apple has previously said iPhone won't run other people's applications for security reasons - or at least so iPhone won't crash - but now it's saying applications written to Web 2.0 Internet standards will run on the thing and tap into its services.

No SDK however. Apple's keeping a lid on this stuff.

Oh, yes, and we read in the paper that to use an iPhone you're gonna have to have an iTunes account and give Apple your name and credit card number so that it knows where all its little iPhones are even if AT&T's selling them.

Meanwhile, Apple describes Leopard, the sixth rendition of Mac OS X delayed so the iPhone could get out in a couple of weeks, as being "near final."

It is currently scheduled to ship in October armed with 300 new features for $129 for a single-user license or $199 for a five-user license, Apple said.

The features include a new Desktop and Dock with Stacks, a new way to organize files; an updated Finder featuring Cover Flow, a new way to browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to preview most files without opening an application; Spaces, a way to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and of course Time Machine, the heralded automatic backup and restore, which now appears will only backup locally not to some Katrina-safe off-site location.

There is also native 64-bit support.

On the server side there are such things as a wiki server; a way to produce and publish podcasts to iTunes or a blog; a scheduling server; and a server to find content on other servers.

The Leopard Server will be priced at $499 for a 10-client edition and $999 for an unlimited license. There will be no client licenses.

Apple released Leopard to developers for testing at the company's developers' conference last week.