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.
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Yes. I HATE the new look of Safari (Beta 4). It's horrid! I've gone back to beta 3.2.
Re:Sticking with Safari 3 (Score:5, Informative)
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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: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: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.
A net interface win (Score:2)
Imagine you were seeing a computer GUI for the first time. And were comparing two programs one of which had tabs like Safari 3 and one of which had tabs like Safari 4. Which would you prefer?
So
It's just an ugly hack. (Score:2)
The URL field is not part of the web page, neither is anything else in the toolbar and bookmarks bar. It makes no sense at all to have static content shared by all tabs inside the tab.
It's just an ugly hack.
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bash$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
Safari runs on Windows too. (Score:2)
As I pointed out in a previous article, that doesn't work on Windows.
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Agree. There's an ambiguity between "I'm clicking this to drag the window" vs. "I'm clicking this to change the active tab" that's really irritating.
I guess I don't see the problem. It works intuitively for me. I click a tab and it switches to that tab. I click a tab and hold the key down and drag and it moves the window. What use case are you having a problem with?
Beta 4 slower than Beta 3 (Score:2)
I have been using Safarai for Windows 3.2 for a while (use it for testing compatability with web pages I build). I downloaded the Beta 4 and ran it through the same web pages I normally do for testing compatability and found Beta 4 ran slower than the Beta 3.2. So I uninstalled Beta4 and went back to Beta 3.2.
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That's a disturbing moniker...
"Safari for Windows 3.2"
you aren't Chinese by any chance? If you are we'll have to tell your masters you've been hacking the great Firewall...
fyi [wikipedia.org]
Safari doesn't work with Hotmail (Score:5, Funny)
Safari is broken, it can't even load hotmail
Re:Safari doesn't work with Hotmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Safari doesn't work with Hotmail (Score:5, Funny)
No. Hotmail comes with every computer, along with Live Search. You can get to it by clicking the blue 'e' thingie.
Re:Safari doesn't work with Hotmail (Score:5, Funny)
That blue 'e' thingie is the Internet... If you're machine doesn't have it you won't be able to play the Yahoo games.
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I hope you were drinking milk. Actually, I kinda don't.
I'm getting old, I don't understand the New Math (Score:5, Insightful)
about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
-
Re:I'm getting old, I don't understand the New Mat (Score:5, Funny)
"There are now at least 85,000 Elvis's around the world, compared to only 170 in 1977 when Elvis died. At this rate of growth, experts predict that by 2019 Elvis impersonators will make up a third of the world population." - The Naked Scientists 3rd December, 2000.
Re:I'm getting old, I don't understand the New Mat (Score:4, Funny)
-Disco Stu
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Day 1: 5m downloads! Fanboi day.
Day 2: 25000 downloads: Windows users who have heard of Apple, but don't want to shell out x000 for a pretty UI.
Day 3: 125 downloads: Linux users with WINE give it a go.
Day 4: 0.6 downloads: Someone posts a link in
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... all you Linux users thinking of running Safari with wine...
[cricket sounds]
Was anyone really thinking of running something like their Web browser in WINE? I mean, I'll use it to run the odd bit of Windows software, but only if there aren't any other options. I guess I can see it for smoke testing browser compatibility, but since WINE is a big question mark in the middle there, it makes more sense in my mind to go another route, like VMs or a dedicated, remote machine.
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?
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How cool would be to have -100% market share?
On a more serious note is there a difference between -2% and -100% market share?
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Yeah,
And is it me, or was the total > 100 %
68.18% IE
21.96% Mozialla
10.91% Safari
1.16% Opera
--------------
102.21%
Just curious.
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Net Applications only gives weekly and daily statistics to paying subscribers.
It's not a surprise that Safari's average for the last month was lower, considering the new browser was just released last week.
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Who cares? This whole article is just a "pat yourself on the back" for Apple fans to justify to themselves why they were so smart to buy a $4000 computer that could have been bought for $1000 if they acquired a generic brand instead. I know. I'm a recovering Appleholic myself. Been there; done that. The only fact that matters is - How many people are using Safari today?
8%
Tiny.
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A recovering Appleholic from 1997? Where on earth is this $4,000 to $1,000 comparison coming from? Look, I own a Mac, but I will take large dumps on Apple very often because most of the praise is undeserved. This crap, though, drives me absolutely insane. I tried really hard for two years to get a laptop with the same quality and weight as my Apple laptop for even close to the same money, and after two years of screwing around, bought another Apple.
The last time it was 4:1 was in the late 90s, and no one wa
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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 Sa
Not Meaningful (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Google Chrome; the browser's first few weeks were all rosy as people flocked to the browser. After a few months, though, things got back to "normal" and users went back to their usual browser after the hype machine had died down and the novelty wore off. If they can get that percentage and KEEP it, then we can say they've achieved something.
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Safari is made by Apple, that fact alone is enough for a very sizable portion of the Slashdot readership to ignore any reason to dislike it.
Opera IS a damn good browser, and it is a shame it doesn't get more
Re:Opera (Score:2)
I suppose it's been updated since it failed my last audition, some years ago. Thanks for the reminder, I'll give it another bash.
Why? Trust. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I'm not saying that Apple always deserves that level of trust. They've made mistakes in the past, some of them real doozies. But in general, the average Mac user has a fairly high regard for Apple products. More so than Microsoft users for Windows products, certainly.
I would generally agree (Score:2)
...but up through Safari version 3 Apple has "stepped in it" when it comes to the browser UI and SSL security. It stinks.
There is no highlighting of the domain name or identity of the https website, there are no extended validation cues, and the lock icon is shown in the corner of the window titlebar far away from the website address.
Just as bad is having no status bar as the default, so people are less likely to notice that a URL-looking link doesn't go to the same place as shown on the page. This also tra
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.
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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 -
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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,
No source (Score:4, Informative)
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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)
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10% is indeed BS.
Even the most Apple biased browser stats I've looked through top it out at 8.3%, the more objective sites put it at around 4%. The thing is, even most Mac users I know use Firefox rather than Safari.
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:
http://www.slashgear.com/apple-os-x-market-share-drops-in-feb-as-vista- [slashgear.com]
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"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 g
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Which would make it perfect for slashdot. You must be new here.
This would be good news for KDE only if... (Score:5, Insightful)
...the KDE folks would "dump" KHTML for Webkit. I just mean "default to Webkit in Konqueror." Such a move would raise Konqueror's profile which cannot be a bad thing.
Right now, Konqueror is a non issue when it comes to browser statistics on the internet. In some statistics, it is lumped like other browsers into the "other" category like here [sirsidynix.com]. And over here [hitslink.com], Konqueror is missing all together! Sad indeed.
While I say this, I know egos are high in the Open Source world, so what I am suggesting has little chance of being adopted.
Now, before I get modded a troll, I would like to know whether what I am suggesting is a very bad thing.
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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.
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f 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.
I don't understand. How is it harder to make urgent security fixes to the open source code of KHTML rather than the open source code of Webkit? You write your patch, release the changes and compile. Now maybe Apple and Google and Nokia and other contributors to Webkit won't like your fix or implement it or pull those changes in, but I don't see why you'd have to wait for Apple to do anything in an emergency.
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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
Am I missing something? (Score:2)
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Just FYi, the site linked to in the article [hitslink.com] only shows Worldwide stats on it's free overview page. So that 7.42% is a worldwide statistic. Which considering the costs associated with a Mac is pretty impressive.
You have to pay for a subscription to that site to see their US and other breakdown stats.
These "rates of change" mean nothing (Score:2)
I used it for a while (Score:2)
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I used Safari 4 beta for a while since it was faster than Firefox, but then it crashed and forgot all my open tabs.
On what OS? It has been rock stable for me so far on OS X. I haven't tried it on Windows (and probably won't) but I'm curious about the stability.
New UI (Score:2)
And for those who want teh snappy without tabs-on-top and other changes, go here [swedishcampground.com] to learn how to revert back to the old ways. I hope these still work once it's out of beta! I like my title bar on the top and a progress meter that actually shows progress, thankyouverymuch.
Safari's Share is 7.5% (Score:2)
Safari's share is more like 7.5%. And it's lower than that on most technology oriented sites.
Benchmark Lies: Safari Beta vs Firefox Stable (Score:2)
In the press releases where they claim to be the fastest, bestest browser, they're comparing the beta release of Safari 4 to the shipping release of Firefox 3.0 instead of the beta release of Firefox 3.1 which is more accurate. This is typical of most of Apple's marketing.
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: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.
No add-ons (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with both Chrome and Safari is a lack of an add-on community [cnet.com]. One of the things that continues to make Firefox a success is that the user community has added all the niche functionality anyone would ever want and more.
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 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.
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Agreed. Chrome with plugins would be killer.
As it stands I can't see a site's Google pagerank with the Google browser.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed, that's the point - a sudden blip in users when a beta's released tells us nothing about long-term popularity, as is the case with Safari too.
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And the original article discusses Safari 4 beta's adoption vs. Safari 3 beta, which did not come out in 2004, so the post that says "when Firefox came out most people didn't realise they even had a choice. It's hardly a fair comparison between 2004 and now" is the one that obviously didn't read.
Nor did you.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Funny)
You and the GGP obviously didn't read the summary.
Yay! This is fun! Quick, somebody, tell me what I obviously forgot to read!
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:5, Informative)
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? ;)
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Are you sure it wasn't a Safari 3 update?
I ran Software Update last night and it did not install the Safari 4 beta.
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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?
That's interesting because I have updated to the latest iTunes through Apple's updater and at no time did it offer to update to the Safari 4 beta. I'm currently using Safari 3. Maybe you just have an outdated Safari 3 and it offered to update you to the most recent Safari 3 release, not the Safari 4 beta.
Re:Not convinced these are genuine users (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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Just curious... does the forcefully installed v3 advertise beta 4?
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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.
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I don't do itunes. I have been using the Safari beta the most over Chrome and Firefox for the last week or so. Doesn't seem to clunk too hard. I quickly un-installed whichever Safari I had tried before, as it didn't suit. IE8 installed itself when I wasn't looking, coulda been the girlfriend, I don't know. THAT would be the bogus stat, if she knew how to open it, but the icon is gone.
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SquirrelFish Extreme was unveiled about a week after Google unveiled Chrome and V8. If you're going to whine about Safari putting tabs on top like Chrome, you could say that Google stole Opera's UI.
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The new JavaScript engine (codenamed SquirrelFish) predates Chrome's and is faster than Chrome's. You've been able to use it in WebKit nightly builds for months now. And it's exactly as compatible as Chrome since Google took Apple's rendering engine to use for Chrome.
Firefox is nice enough and I definitely prefer it on Windows. On the Mac, though, it's just a slow browser with an old-fashioned UI.
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.
can you steal open source? (Score:2)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10041995-92.html [cnet.com]
"Open-source software may be moved freely from one project to another; though license particulars sometimes erect barriers, both Chrome and WTL use relatively liberal licenses. "
so- you say they 'stole' the UI-- does that mean it's ok to move code freely, but not UI appearance?
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Yep. To see if they're still doing it I asked iTunes to update and lo and behold, the Apple Software Updater comes up and lists Bonjour and iTunes in the top half of the dialog, and near the bottom, off on its own, is 'Safari' 23MB (iirc) download, already pre-checked for me. Hmmm... I wonder if I had automatic updating configured if it would simply show up on my machine? LOL.
That's not the Safari 4 Beta (Score:3, Insightful)
If you actually paid attention, you'd be able to tell that that wasn't the Safari 4 Beta, but just an update to Safari 3.
As several others have noted in this thread (whom you apparently ignored), you have to deliberately go out and download the Safari 4 Beta from Apple's website.
Dan Aris
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If they are, they're doing it very well. I got hit with a QuickTime and iTunes update yesterday, didn't really pay attention to it and just agreed to everything. I checked for Safari just now, wondering if I'd agreed to download it as part of yesterday's update - but no, I don't have it.
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I'm on a mac, and my software update didn't even offer me Safari 4 beta. You have to go to Apple's website and choose to download it.
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I'm on a PC, and my software update didn't even offer me an opt-in warning. You have to go to Windows Explorer and choose to uninstall it. I rarely open IE, but did so the other day and discovered that MS had hijacked and upgraded it. man this OS sucks.
Not questionable - BULLSHIT stats (Score:2)
From TFA:
Overall market share among the top five dominant browsers remained largely stable through February, according to Net Applications.
.
.
But the main change came with Apple's Safari, after the version 4 beta of the browser was released last week.
The beta release helped push Apple's browser market share to 10.91 per cent, or 1.88 per cent more than the same time in the week before its release. Last month, it was 9.04 per cent.
Uhh... No.
Last month [hitslink.com], according to above mentioned Net Applications, Safari's share was 7.42%.
Same numbers you will get if you click the link in TFA to see that 10.91% market share.
Cause you CAN'T SEE THE WEEKLY REPORT UNLESS YOU PAY.
But, if the above claimed 9.04% is any indication at the accuracy of TFA (compared to the actual 7.42%) - then Safari probably jumped about 0.26%.
Or less... or more... who knows. Maybe there were only 5 copies downloaded?
I mean... if you pad your stats by 22% (21.83% -
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Safari 4 is Beta and doesn't come bundled, it's a separate download. It's not even offered through software updates or pushed by marketing as the thing to load because it's still Beta. Just a link on the website, similar to Chrome. But Chrome isn't available on Mac and is only 90% complete. This is a decent software company that has a minor market share and can't afford losing their user base over sub-par software. Beta's come fully featured (like any decent software creator does) and have some minor/major
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Yeah it's really fucking hard to gain share when the browser comes bundled with your OS...
...except the beta we're talking about doesn't come bundled with the OS.
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The Safari 4 Beta is not being installed on new Macs or pushed out via the update system. Every person that is using it had to download it manually, just like with Google Chrome.
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Actually, what probably happened is that a whole shitload of people downloaded Safari to see if it didn't suck yet. There is no word on what metric this alleged "market share" is based on, where the statistics came from, or why you should believe these people. "IT Pro" indeed. Who the fuck is Miya Knights? You might as well base your assumptions on a random article on Slashdot by some guy called drinkypoo.
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the people who just use the browser their OS comes with aren't installing a beta of that browser by hand.
also Safari is available for Windows, fyi.
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The first thing I thought when I saw the post was "How is it being distributed/advertised compared to other browsers?". While they have a much smaller install base than MS, Apple has a much more controlling attitude which made me wonder if they were pushing this to any network connected Apple system by default. If that's the case, then the uptake rate is, wholely, artificial and will stall as soon as the majority of Apple systems have finished updating.
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Although this is answered several other places here, I'll reiterate: this is only a beta, and is not being distributed by software update. Therefore, none of the uptake can be said to be 'artificial' in the manner you imply.
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I'm not sure what you're talking about. I went to Apple's site, typed "Safari" into their search field, and among the links on the first page of results there is the page you seek [apple.com].
Also note that if you do download the beta of Safari 4, it actually contains two installers: one to try the new beta, and another to revert to the previous stable version. This is true on OSX, at least. (I don't have a Windows machine.)