Apple claims that more than 1 million copies of Safari for Windows were downloaded in the first 48 hours since the free public beta was made available on Monday.

The announcement follows the first update for the new browser that was released late Thursday, which fixes some early reported bugs.

Safari 3 renders web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, based on the iBench tests, according to Apple.. The browser supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java.

Safari 3 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.