It looks like our estimate of thousands of downloads of Apple’s Safari web browser for Windows was a little bit on the conservative side. Apple has confirmed that there was over 1 million downloads of the browser withing 48 hours of its release last Monday. While this may sound impressive for most companies this product has a lot to live up to, even in cross-over world of PC’s since it’s iTunes sibling has had over 500 million downloads for use on Windows machines.

Safari as a whole also has a long way to go in the browser market as well. According to Apple the browser has about 5 percent of the market compared to the 15 percent of Mozilla and the strong 80% lead that IE continues to hold. A rocky start with some security vulnerabilities in the new Windows Safari version may have also stole a little thunder from the launch but Apple was quick to repair and release an upgraded version.

While Safari is something new and comes from the “cool kid” on the block, there are other alternative browsers to IE if you’re interested. If you’ve never really ventured far from the Windows Internet Explorer experience, the Firefox browser is a nice alternative that’s a little more long in the tooth and has a host of pretty nice plug-ins and unique skins. In fact you can probably even make it look quite a bit like the new Safari browser.

Image Credit: AP