Opera may be reinventing the web next week, but in the meantime the browser wars continue to rage on. Apple has come out with a news release claiming its latest browser, Safari 4, has topped 11 million downloads in the first three days of its release. Surprisingly, it also claims over half of those (or 6 million to be specific) were the Windows version of the program.

Apple continues to tout the speed of its browser, claiming that it loads HTML pages 3 times faster than both Firefox 3 and IE8, and that the new Nitro JavaScript engine executes JavaScript nearly 8 times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Mozilla’s latest browser version. On a related note, Apple also says in the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard release, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 %.

As Erick has stated before, the discussion regarding which company now markets the fastest browser – I’m sticking to Google Chrome – is irrelevant as long as all of them speed up.