Apple today announced that people have downloaded more than 1 million copies of Safari for Windows in the first 48 hours since the free public beta was made available on Monday. Safari has generated a tremendous amount of interest, in part because of people questioning Apple’s speed claims for the browser and because of publicity because of several significant bugs in the new browser.

Apple claims that Safari 3 is the fastest browser running on Windows*, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. Independent tests show Safari’s speed to be no better than Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Several significant bugs with Safari for Windows have been documented by security analysts. The first update for Safari for Windows was released last night and fixes some early reported bugs.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.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. Testing conducted on an iMac 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows XP, with 1GB of RAM.