Sounds like Apple's got a hit on its hands, at least if the ratings are any indication; MacMinute reports that, during a keynote of his own yesterday, Phil "Love Me, Love My Carpet" Schiller revealed that no fewer than 300,000 rabid Mac users descended upon Apple's hapless flock of servers and snapped up the public beta release of Safari, the company's spiffy new web browser, on its first day of release. "Is that a lot?" you ask. "Well, yes," we answer. According to Phil, the most release-day downloads Apple's logged previously was a comparatively puny 100,000 back when iTunes came out, so it's pretty safe to say that this totally crushes Apple's previous first-day download record into a pile of fine dust and then sets said dust on fire.

Just to put things into a smidgen of perspective (aw, c'mon-- a teensy little bit won't kill you), let's think about those numbers another way. During the Stevenote, Fearless Leader indicated that there are now five million active users of Mac OS X, did he not? Well, Safari's a Mac OS X-only browser, which means that roughly one in every sixteen users who could run Safari ran out and grabbed it the first day it went public. And actually, that's not really true, either, since Safari requires Jaguar, and we sincerely doubt that 100% of the Mac OS X user community has shelled out for the upgrade. So we're blithely going to take a semi-educated guess and figure that there are maybe three million Jaguar users tops, which means that one in ten of the target market felt an urgent need to scarf up Safari within its first twenty-four hours on this side of Cupertino's Silicon Curtain.

Of course, first-day download numbers aren't necessarily an indication of success; just because 300,000 people tuned in to watch doesn't mean that 300,000 people actually liked what they saw. What this really says is that Apple did a good job in identifying a need-- i.e., Mac OS X users want a web browser that isn't IE, and if that browser is free and comes from Apple, all the better. Whether or not Safari fills that need remains to be seen, but so far the feedback filtering into the AtAT compound has been pretty overwhelmingly positive. Oh, sure, most people want some additional features tossed in, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks that can indicate if a site's changed since the last visit, etc. (Personally, we're hoping Apple adds RSS support, a macro-type feature like OmniWeb's Shortcuts, and at the very least the ability to see the URL of a link before actually clicking it.) But this is a beta, Apple can add features over time, and overall, thumbs are already pointing in the general direction known as "up."

If you're the type that likes to keep your ear to the ground in some generally seedy places, you may have encountered some rumors a while back that Microsoft had no plans to develop Internet Explorer for Mac OS X beyond bug fixes to the current version. If that turns out to be true, it's now pretty easy to guess why. On a broader scale, we're getting pretty intrigued to see how this swipe at Redmond (not to mention that other little shot across the bow-- namely, Keynote's attempt to out-PowerPoint PowerPoint) affects Microsoft's plans to continue porting Office to the Mac, since the company is no longer contractually obligated to do so. Is there a war brewin' behind the scenes?