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."
Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Until they fix the title-bar abuse, I'm sticking with Safari 3.
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it just did when I just updated iTunes about 15 minutes ago. I do NOT have Safari on this machine and it had ticked Safari as a 23MB (iirc) 'update' that was in the bottom half of the dialog off on its own. Nice of them to check mark that download for my own good, eh? ;)
Re:I'm getting old, I don't understand the New Mat (Score:4, Interesting)
about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
So, they started out with -1% market share?
Re:I'm getting old, I don't understand the New Mat (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote a long post which appears to have been eaten. In summary:
Even allowing for rounding, the growth per day must be less than 0.26125%. Their other statistics are quoted accurately, indeed, to not just 1, but 2 decimal places. There is no way it is reasonable to represent the growth as "almost 0.5%" per day.
I'm not sure how we can trust an article that doesn't get basic maths right.
Secondly, their article is a blatant lie - the original source http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 [hitslink.com] lists Safari as 7.42% (the other browsers are all reported accurately).
Re:No source (Score:3, Interesting)
"I don't even think Apple has 10% of computer market share which makes the claim even more unlikely unless there is some specific reason Mac users are more likely to be internet users than Linux or Windows users are. See here:
h**p://www.slashgear.com/apple-os-x-market-share-drops-in-feb-as-vista-use-rises-0236001/"
This is almost a given in a tight economy.
Apple does not price it's products "affordably" (read - cheap), so when someone chooses a new computer based on the lowest possible price point they are going to get The-Only-Other-Game-In-Town, Vista.
But does this mean that Vista market penetration is necessarily rising?
No.
It does mean that the metrics used to measure Vista marketshare by Net Applications may have risen for the month, but not that it truly rose overall (BTW, did anyone actually see those numbers/spreadsheets/data to substantiate the claim?).
Next month may see a downturn in those numbers, as those nice new shiny netbooks and laptops are hit by conficker, or users grow tired of the UAC, or Chicken Little says the sky is falling, and owners decide to upgrade (legally or otherwise) to XP, server 2008, Ubuntu, Debian, or what ever else tickles their fancy.
As for me, I remain skeptical. I know several people who are putting XP on new hardware, and several more who said they would, if the spectre of MS support for it discontinuing didn't weigh on their minds.
Re:Why? Trust. (Score:3, Interesting)
quicktime - the most reprehensible video codec ever - it's almost as bad as malware with all the crap that installs with it - even when you tell it not to.
itunes for pc - egads - how many times do you have to say no - don't install this or that, and watch it try to install anyway. again - malware grade software installer
safari - crashed multiple systems, and couldn't open basic sites - will never install another version - ever - oh - the calling home stuff built into it - on par with the latest botnet.
osx - how many macs have been bricked by faulty updates? more than apple would like you to know...
apple hardware - at a minimum 4 times more expensive than it should be - just for a name or apple logo? hardly worth it...
It's a shame that on Apple stories, the mods abuse negative mods for things they disagree with - it's the only category I have to browse at -1.
I haven't used Safari, but I am in full agreement with the rest, especially Quicktime. Given how people rightly dislike things like Realplayer here on Slashdot, why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive, and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode? Oh, because it's Apple, and they're held to a different standard.
This reminds me of when someone was repeating the "Just Works" mantra, and claiming that whenever he uses Windows to do things like watching a video, there's always things about it that distracts him from just trying to get on and do it. I said I'd never experienced this, but funningly enough, I concede that that evening, I did have frustrations when trying to do something as basic as watching a video on Windows.
It was a quicktime video.