Yesterday the web professionals’ world was consumed with talk about Apple’s new version of its browser, Safari. Amazingly enough, it now runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Mac OS X. It’s also free and you can download a beta version.

The question is why would you? I did, just to test the sites that I am paid to maintain. But these are very large sites with high traffic, and I needed to know if they worked on this new browser. (Answer: yes.)

For a church website, though, I can’t see why you’d want to, unless you simply enjoy this kind of thing. Safari 3 is full of bugs and security flaws. It crashes easily and often. It’s beta, so I don’t think that’s a big deal, but it does argue against downloading it unless you have a compelling reason. A compelling reason would be your site statistics showing a significant number of visitors using Safari 3.

Steve Jobs says it’s twice as fast as other browsers. That appeared to be true on my PC, but so what if it doesn’t work correctly? According to the New York Times, Mr. Jobs also said “the company was encouraging Apple software developers to use modern Internet software standards to make applications compatible with Apple’s iPhone.” To my mind, this is where Safari 3 has the potential to really matter.

When I tested, I did notice the improved use of standards, particularly in the way it renders forms (which previously have been quirky in Safari). But most important is that WebKit, the engine behind Safari, is being open-sourced, so developers can create apps that will run within Safari on the iPhone.

What this means is that in time (maybe this fall?) church professionals are likely to hear from congregants looking at the church site on their new iPhones. When that day arrives, ask them to show you. That’s when Safari 3 will matter for your church site, and chances are they would love to show off their new toy.

For more information, see Techmeme’s aggregation of Safari 3 articles.