It makes perfect sense for Apple to release its Safari web browser for Windows, but the question is: What right-thinking Windows user would want it?

Steve Jobs' unexpected announcement Monday that the public beta of Safari 3 runs on Windows left the crowd at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco murmuring its approval.

But the initiative seems to rely on a domino theory fueled by infatuation. Apple is hoping there are Windows users so in love with their iPods and iTunes that they will also download Safari. Then they'll fall in love with that, and the next thing you know they'll be down at the Apple Store fishing for their credit cards.

There's only one problem with that scenario – Safari sucks. A lot of Mac users won't run the browser (I'm one of them), so why would anyone run it on Windows?

On my Mac, Safari is buggy and unreliable. It's always crashing, and it doesn't offer basic features like remembering all the tabs you have open after you quit (or more likely, after it crashes). Until now, it didn't even warn you before closing multiple tabs, although the new version of Safari fixes this.

Firefox is getting a little bloated these days, but it's a better browser.

For Windows users, the browser market is already far too crowded – who needs anything other than Internet Explorer or Firefox? Safari is one browser too many.

A couple of Windows users I've talked to would happily ditch Firefox for Internet Explorer if only IE supported some of Mozilla browser's handy plug-ins. Wired magazine contributing editor Fred Vogelstein for one would love to run Explorer. (Vogelstein is also the only person in the world who runs Windows XP full time on his new MacBook).

Safari doesn't support plug-ins (at least plug-ins that aren't hacks) and it certainly doesn't benefit from a thriving community of plug-in developers the way Firefox does.

These days, browsers are taken for granted – you can't even give this stuff away.

But I'm sure there will be millions of downloads by looky-loos curious to see if Safari is better. One developer at WWDC suggested Safari might be more secure than IE if it doesn't run ActiveX controls (ActiveX is a source of much malicious code).

Of course, Apple has good reasons to offer Safari to Windows users. The company has little to lose. It may gain new users, and there's no danger that Microsoft will try to crush Apple like it crushed Netscape – the browser wars are over. Plus, Apple is more likely to take market share from Firefox than IE.

Apple is also throwing a bone to iPhone developers. If developers create software for the highly anticipated gadget using Jobs' "sweet" Safari development plan, they get to run those apps in Safari on Windows for free. Maybe this is part of Apple's plan to create a plug-in platform for Safari – by offering it up as a big platform for developers. And maybe in a year or so Safari will be a better browser because of it.

Perhaps most importantly, Apple is turning WebKit – the engine that drives Safari – into a big open-source development project to rival Mozilla.

One developer at WWDC said many open-source programmers are very excited about Apple's support for WebKit. Unlike Mozilla, which has only a nonprofit foundation to back its efforts, two big companies are pushing WebKit: Apple and Nokia, which is using the technology for some of its smartphones.

So Apple has every reason to dangle Safari in front of Windows users. But right now, I can't see any good reasons for Windows users to take the bait.

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