Apple said its so called world's fastest browser Safari 4 has been downloaded 11 million times since it was released three days ago and more than half of the downloads came from PCs and laptops that use rival Windows as its operating system.

Of the more than 11 million downloads as of Wednesday, more than six million were for Windows, according to Apple.

Apple released the latest version of is Web browser Monday at the company's World Wide Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The company claims Safari 4 runs JavaScript and loads Web pages at a faster rate than rivals Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows, said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in a statement.

Safari 4 offers HTML 5 offline support that lets developers build Web apps that store themselves on a computer where they can be immediately accessed. Other Safari 4 features include full-page zoom, ARIA support, Smart Address Field, full history search and a smart search field.

Safari use has risen slightly since January, when it had an 8.29 percent share, but Firefox saw a bigger gain of nearly 1 percent. IE, on the other hand, fell more than 2 percent.

Safari 4 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download at apple.com.

Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002, a minimum 256 MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel (NSDQ:INTC)-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor and built-in FireWire.

Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500MHz Intel Pentium processor.

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