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But there must be more to it than that. That wider audience thing is a clue. Apple is about the experience and for many of the people who will by an iPhone, if it’s as easy and cool to get online as its proported to be, it will be the first time they will have got online with a mobile device. But what they will get is Safari, a browser than unless they have a Mac, they will never have seen before. By bringing Safari to PC it makes for a more comfortable experience. Like Jobs said at WWDC, 1,000,000 people have downloaded iTunes, why wouldn’t they do the same with Safari? It seems to have worked, with Apple claiming over a million downloads in the first 48 hours.

Whether that can be sustained time will tell, especially as many users, yours truly included, encountered bugs almost straight away, and a number of flaws discovered as well. Apple did well by releasing an update to deal with these very quickly, but security on a browser is something that Apple is going to have to learn how to deal with double quick. The Mac is famed for its lack of viruses, but we all know really that that is because the market share is so small that virus writers don’t tend to target it. That’ll change big-time for Safari on PC.

What other big reason that Apple is going to the effort is cash. With this announcement the blogosphere has been discussing the fact that the Google toolbar in every browser is a revenue generator. Every time a search is done using one, Google gives a share of the ad revenue generated by the resultant page to Mozilla or in the case of Safari, to Apple. With a small market share Apple makes a small amount of money. With a large market share, Apple makes a ton of money. I think I’ve got the basics of the equation fairly clear there.

In addition though, it’s an example of Apple’s ever increasing bravado. It dominates with the iPod, it wants to do the same with the iPhone. The iMac and MacBooks have a great reputation and are gaining market share, and it even wants to get into gaming in a big way, which almost sounds laughable. In every way it appears to be growing.

In fact it could be seen to be trying to take over the PC market from the inside. There’s was no way the Mac was ever going to defeat the PC head on, so if it couldn’t beat them, it joined ‘em, and big time. In the 80s, what many people don’t realise is that Microsoft was one of the biggest software developers on the Mac. Now what many haven’t noticed is that Apple is on of the biggest players on the PC. We’ve had Quicktime for years but now even people without iPods use iTunes. Mac’s now run Intel processors and now we have Safari on Windows.

Whether Safari will manage to draw people away from IE and Firefox remains to be seen. It does seem fast, but at the moment the experience is speedy but brief, as crashes are common. Of course, it is just a beta and we’ll have a first-look review up soon. Some have already written of Apple’s chances of success in the browser wars, but however it pans out it is yet another signal of intent from Cupertino that the barrage it’s laying down on Redmond is just going to get stronger.

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