Safari on Windows – why?

I read Gruber’s link to an old ZDnet story this morning, and I thought what nonsense. When Safari (and the Finder) need so much work on the Mac, why would you throw your hat in the ring with Safari on Windows when Firefox is already beating Internet Explorer over there, for free, no less?

It’s a fun idea, but I want Apple to make the Mac great, not Windows. Surely this must herald the eventual appearance of a OS X running on non-Apple hardware, right? Isn’t that the only reason you’d try to tempt Windows users with superior Apple software – give ’em a taste of Safari and they’ll pony up for OS X Leopard Ultimate Business Edition for $129?

Strange development.

Update: Here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of, but makes perfect sense, by Michael Gartenberg:

By bringing Safari over to the Windows platform and leveraging that platforms center of gravity, Apple is betting it can grow the installed Safari base (among folks who have no interest in IE and don’t want to depend of Firefox) and therefore insure [sic] that Mac OS as a web platform will always have the latest and greatest Internet support as well.

Update 2: Gruber points out another, even more obvious reason for Apple to do this: money. Every time I hit cmd+K in Firefox, I think about the fact that Mozilla is getting paid for my curiosity. I love Firefox, so I don’t mind, but it is odd that they’ve monetized a behavior I would engage in anyway.