Not sure why Apple is doing this....
Support. To get major sites such as banks to support Safari they need more users than Apple itself currently has. Get 5% of the Windows market and they are over the hump to being major enough that they will gain increasing support. Hopefully the name recognition will get Safari taking market share from IE rather than Firefox. I'd like to see each around 30%.
Safari users a variant on the same rendering engine as the Konquerer browser in the KDE windowing environment on Linux. I wonder if Apple will make a Safari that can plug in in place of Konquerer? Sites that support Safari are almost certain to work in Konquerer as well. Which swells the effective market share of the duo to the total share for each.
and don't expect any activex happiness ......
For which I will be thankfull if I decide to try Safari and I may well do so.