by , 2:10 PM EDT, June 11th, 2007

Steve Jobs seems to think that Windows users need another alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, so he is offering them a gift in the form of Safari. Mr. Jobs surprised attendees at the World Wide Developers Conference with the news during his keynote presentation on Monday.

Safari 3, which presumably will be released along with Mac OS X 10.5 in October, will offer faster HTML rendering than Internet Explorer and Firefox, according to Mr. Jobs. In fact, Safari 3 is to be twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7.

Like previous versions of Safari, Safari 3 retains familiar features like tabbed browsing, pop-up ad blocking, private browsing, SnapBack, and built-in RSS support. It also supports resizing text fields in forms, an inline Find feature for searching text on Web sites, and more.

Public beta versions of Safari 3 for Mac OS X 10.4.9, Windows XP, and Windows Vista are available at the Apple Web site.

[This article has been updated with additional information about Safari 3]