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Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the popularity-contests dept.

ClaraBow writes "Apple reports that it took Apple just two days to reach 1 million downloads of its newest Safari Web browser for Windows. If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users, then we just might have a third major browser on the Windows platform. If Safari can obtain a 10% market share on Windows, then it would further weaken IE's position and give standards-based browsers more leverage with developers."

5 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. It makes me wonder... by jZnat · · Score: 5, Informative

    These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 will become another large competitor on Windows. Konqueror and Safari both share a very common core (KHTML/WebKit), so the renderring and page handling should be relatively the same. Web designers can get another speedy and a more native web browsers that tests their sites for the same purpose, and general users can get a lightweight, standards-compliant, open source web browser (without the OSS requirements, you can already get this with Opera, of course) that won't try to enforce another platform's "look'n'feel" like Apple's apps all do.

    For the interested, you can grab an alpha copy of KDE 4 (download qt-copy, kdelibs, and kdebase at the very least; you can use either GCC/Cygwin or MS Visual Studio to compile it). On OS X, there are precompiled universal binaries for everything, and Kubuntu and openSUSE users can get packages for it from their respective websites.

    --
    'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
    1. Re:It makes me wonder... by Allicorn · · Score: 5, Informative

      Took off?

      Just because I downloaded the thing doesn't mean I'm going to switch to using it seriously.

      Maybe I just wanted a giggle!

      --
      OMG!!! Ponies!!!
    2. Re:It makes me wonder... by Andrew+Tanenbaum · · Score: 5, Informative

      You must not be a very good developer. Windows+IE7 is free for testing.

      Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image:
      http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displa ylang=en

      You can convert the VPC image to the format of your VM of choice (I use VMWare Player on Linux).

  2. Re:Excellent news :-) by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's almost as many downloads as firefox got in its first 24 hrs.


    That kind of depends on which release of Firefox you're talking about.

    The first "preview release" of Firefox took about 100 hours to break 1 million downloads.
    Then Firefox 1.0 hit 1 million downloads in about 24 hours.
    And Firefox 1.5 hit 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours.
    And Firefox 2 hit a bit over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours.

    I'd say the first public beta of Safari for Windows is most equivalent to Firefox's first preview release, so in those terms it's doing pretty damn well, especially considering it was just mentioned at WWDC and then immediately posted on Apple's website, whereas Firefox had been publicly developed and hyped for a long time before it's preview release. But then again, it's still well below the rate of download of the most current release of Firefox.

    A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.


    Well, everyone except microsoft and mozilla, who could lose market share and search revenue...

    I really hope that Apple does carve itself a good chunk of windows browser market share, because that would provide a lot of support for a more standards based and platform/browser independent web. But I'm not sure Apple is really betting anything on their ability to do so; if they just make it easier for more web developers to target and test for Webkit/Safari/iPhone/etc, I think they'll consider Safari for windows a success and take any market share gains as a nice bonus.
    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  3. How Apple cheated on benchmarks by g8oz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Basically the Safari fires the onload event before the document is ready. This gives the mistaken impression in some test suites that it is faster than it really is.

    http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.html