Safari Beta Takeup Tops Firefox, IE and Chrome 342
nk497 writes "The release of the beta for the next version of Apple's Safari browser last week helped drive Apple's market share above ten per cent. The Safari beta has gained users at a rate of about 0.5 per cent a day since its release, topping one per cent by day four. For comparison, Microsoft's beta of IE took six months to hit one percent, Chrome needed almost a month, and Firefox 3 took a week."
Re:Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't Google Chrome [what-is-what.com] get 3% market share in like a day or something? Here's the /. story on that:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/03/1343226 [slashdot.org]
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:5, Informative)
No source (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:4, Informative)
How many of these new users actually even know they are new users ? I bet the majority of them are idiots who just click on the apple update for their itunes/ipod and done even realise Apple are basicaslly pushing crap onto their PCs that they done even know or want.
Zero. This is a beta release and is not distributed via software update yet. You have to go to Apple's Web site and download it.
Re:No source (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:2, Informative)
Until they fix the title-bar abuse, I'm sticking with Safari 3.
I prefer the new title bar. It saves me a little bit of vertical space without losing any utility. I call that a win. I suppose they could add a preference for the "old way" for curmudgeons that don't like change.
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:3, Informative)
Plus, these statistics are not based on downloads, but on usage. If it were based on installation, IE would likely have a far stronger showing.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
It did, and then dropped back to near zero as people said "that's pretty good" and then went back to their regular browsers.
Re:Okay, but why do we want it? (Score:5, Informative)
It looks to me like all they've done is rework Safari to make it emulate Chrome.
They pulled in a much, much newer version of Webkit including the new javascript engine Chrome does not use. They added a huge amount of support for HTML 5, CSS 3, XML, SVG 1.1 and a lot of other cool, new technologies that have been languishing. They added resolution independent zoom, anti-phishing, and revamped their plug-in architecture. Those speed and functional improvements are the major items in my mind. They changed up the UI and the tabs are more similar to Chrome, as is the default start page, but neither is quite the same and while more visible at first blush, are pretty minor.
So, you could use Safari and get the features of Chrome at a larger memory footprint or you could just run Chrome.
Or, if you're running OS X you can't run Chrome because they haven't even released a version yet.
. Chrome isn't as full featured as Safari, but covers 95% of what people need for normal web browser.
If you're on Windows I'd argue Safari isn't your best choice as a browser... but then that is not Safari's main market. On OS X it crushes most of the competition including Firefox. It is fast and has features that have not been cloned yet. You seem to take issue with browsers cloning the innovations of others, I wish other browser makers would do it. Every time I find myself on a Windows box using any other browser I wish I could expand text boxes (like the one I'm typing in now) to be able to see my whole comment. It's been years now.
Re:Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:5, Informative)
sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
Okay, so it's not a checkbox, but meh - you only need to do it once.
Re:No add-ons (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with both Chrome and Safari is a lack of an add-on community.
Well, they certainly don't have the market share of Firefox, but they do have useful and usable plug-ins on Safari. Also, this beta revamps the plug-in architecture of Safari to some degree, while still conforming to the Netscape plug-in standard.
Re:No source (Score:2, Informative)
But, for Safari, the article says 10.91%, but the stats page says 7.42% -- that's a big difference!
Can anybody find where this 10% figure comes from (my personal guess is outta thin air)
Re:Okay, but why do we want it? (Score:1, Informative)
Oh, that's all they've done, is it?
The new JavaScript runtime was in the works long before Google announced Chrome and V8.
Webkit itself has been significantly changed since Safari 3. Lots more bug fixes, performance improvements, and a ton of new features. Almost all of which Chrome benefits from as well - the actual rendering engine is by far the biggest and most complex component of any web browser. Apple did almost all of the work on that, not Google.
Re:Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you don't need sudo. (Unless you run safari as root). It's a 'per user' setting.
Re:No add-ons (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox's add-ons aren't just plugins. They're browser extensions that can make the browser do just about anything and look just about anyway you can imagine. For example, there's an extension called 'All-in-One Sidebar' that basically adds Opera's sidebar functionality to Firefox. Before the Awesome Bar came into being, there were extensions that did this.
Yes and nope. (Score:5, Informative)
Qt already ships with WebKit as of Qt 4.4, released a while ago. Mind you, I don't consider it usable yet, seeing as the included WebKit is a little dated and lacks such features as, you know, Netscape plugin support (so no Flash).
Qt 4.5 will ship a more recent and useful version of WebKit, however, with support for such things as W3C selectors API, 100% ACID3 compliance, HTML5 audio and video, CSS canvas drawing, masks and reflections, and a few more things.
Nevertheless, KHTML is still set to remain Konqueror's default rendering engine, as far as I understand, for reasons of trust, quite simply. I don't necessarily agree, mind you, but I do understand, if nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
Mind you, this is KDE, so switching to WebKit by default is probably one setting away. Probably in Configure file associations > text/html > Embedding, move webkitpart to the top of the preferred service list. I'm going to do that right away, actually.
Re:This would be good news for KDE only if... (Score:3, Informative)
QT is planning on including WebKit as a standard feature at some point (they may already). When that happens, KDE will drop KHTML and use WebKit instead.
They have already started using WebKit for certain portions of KDE. From the 'KDE 4.1 beta [kde.org]' news release:
I thought 4.2 was meant to start using WebKit across the board, but I can't seem to find any references in that regards.
Re:No add-ons (Score:1, Informative)
there is a difference between plug-ins and add-ons. Netscape plug-ins are a given for any browser. Add-ons are what make firefox so extendable, and that's what the GP is talking about.
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I would generally agree (Score:4, Informative)
Actually (and I just checked), but Safari 3.2.1 (on Leopard, at least) displays the name of the extended validation cert owner next to the lock icon in the top right corner.
Re:Benchmark Lies: Safari Beta vs Firefox Stable (Score:2, Informative)
They did compare it to Fx 3.1
Re:Why? Trust. (Score:3, Informative)
why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive
Because on the Mac it's not, and most people championing Apple are Mac users. From what I hear about QuickTime, iTunes, etc on Windows, it sounds atrocious, and I can't imagine how Apple can stand having something so horrible tarnish their "it just works" image.
and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode
This has always pissed me off though, and until OSX I kept to an older version of QuickTime Player that didn't have that disabled. (QuickTime is not a player application but a whole media framework: file formats, codecs, APIs, etc. QuickTime Player, any version, calls on the underlying QuickTime API to handle everything; so sticking to the old Player while updating the framework didn't have any negative side effects).