It’s an odd time for Apple to kick off another round of the browser wars.

Apple is still waiting for Microsoft to release a ‘native’ version of Microsoft Office for the new generation of Intel-based Macs, and throwing this Windows version of the previously Mac-only Safari browser in Microsoft’s face hardly seems likely to foster good relations between the two companies. Still, that’s Apple for you.

Politics aside, Safari is certainly a well-designed browser – as you’d expect from Apple – even if it’s far from being an Explorer-killer. There aren’t any massive differences between Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – or, for that matter, other browsers, such as Opera or Firefox. The basic features are pretty much the same, although there are often differences in how particular features are implemented.

For instance, both Internet Explorer and Safari have a bookmarks bar, in which you can store your favourite bookmarks for quick access. However, Safari’s Bookmark Editor window makes it easier to group multiple bookmarks together on the bookmark bar – such as your main set of news sites – and then display this group of bookmarks as a pulldown menu so that you can quickly select one specific bookmark.

The Bookmark Editor also comes in handy when organising tabs. We like the option that tells Safari to open an entire set of bookmarks as a series of tabs, and also the ability to ‘pull’ a tab off the page with your mouse and open it up in an entirely new window, which wasn’t available in the earlier Mac version.

However, it’s a shame Safari doesn’t have a similar feature to IE7's Quick Tabs option, which creates a new page containing thumbnail previews of all open tabs.

One clever feature in Safari is its Find command. Most web browsers simply highlight words on a page when you use their Find tool, but this means it can still be hard to spot a single word on a long or particularly text-heavy page. To make it easier to spot the words you’re looking for, Safari 3 dims the entire page and then highlights the words so that they really stand out.

According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the biggest difference between Safari and Explorer is its sheer speed. Jobs’s demo at Apple’s recent Worldwide Developer Conference included a batch of statistics that claimed Safari is up to twice as fast as Explorer for tasks such as loading web pages or running Javascript.

However, this is the sort of claim that comes under the heading of ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’. Apple’s test results may well be true – we wouldn’t suggest otherwise – but on a day-to-day basis, you’re unlikely to notice much difference between the two browsers.

We suspect Apple’s real motive is not to challenge Explorer, but to prepare the market for the arrival of the iPhone. Safari will also be installed on the iPhone, so a bit of extra market penetration for Safari on the Windows platform should make web developers more conscientious in ensuring their websites work properly with Safari (and, therefore, with the iPhone).

Various security flaws have been discovered, but this is beta software so it’s hardly surprising.

The bottom line is that Safari is a very nice browser, with a cleaner-looking interface than its Microsoft counterpart. But it doesn’t have any features that deliver a knockout blow to Internet Explorer. The Public Beta version of the software is available to download from Apple’s website, so you’re free to try it out for yourself.