The battle of the browsers will heat up in next months, because Apple unleashed its browser on Windows PCx. According to Apple’s statement and iBench tests, Safari is twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

The news was announced by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, who said Safari currently has 4.9 percent of the browser business. Until now the only browser that tried to conquer the Interne Explorer domination is Firefox, that achieved in two years 15 per cent of the market. Despite Firefox’s ascension, Microsoft’s IE is still the market leader with 78 per cent of browsers market.

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.”

Beside its speed (which of course remains to be proven) Safari 3 offers a easy-to-manage bookmarks system, tabbed browsing and a built-in RSS reader.

In the past two years Safari gained market share slowly but steady, and the usage of Apple’s browser was considered also a sign of the increased numbers of Macs sold worldwide. Until now, Safari was a browser dedicated only to Mac users.

Safari 3 public beta is available today as a free download at www.apple.com/safari and the final version will be available in October when Apple will introduce also the latest version of its OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.