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Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times
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."
I downloaded Safari when it was announced, and it's a really slick browser in windows. It's got a little quirks that are reminiscent of mac os x features that might be confusing to PC users, but honestly it's great being able to test safari, firefox, opera and IE all in windows now. It makes my job much easier as a web dev.
I'm really glad that apple released this, and I hope it does well at establishing a good sized customer base. Competition is _always_ good, even if it draws market share from firefox.
Well, in the sense that PC users who are adventurous enough to try Firefox might also give Safari a try and perhaps stick with it, yes. But Apple has something Firefox doesn't: iTunes. Apple can reach millions of PC users who may never have heard of Firefox, but may give Safari a try because they like iTunes.
I don't cry any tears over a little loss of marketshare for Firefox. Let's rejoice the fact that the marketshare of standards-compliant browsers goes up. THAT's why it is important to eat away at IE's marketshare.
Bert
The interest seem to have been pretty high, but I wonder if anyone there could use it for more than a straight full hour.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Actually, the KDE guys (in particular, the ever awesome Zack Rusin) are working with the WebKit people in order to make WebKit work on the same rendering canvas that KDE uses (namely Qt's QPainterDevice). So Konqueror 4 will most likely use WebKit itself, rather than KHTML, on all three platforms, Linux, Windows and Mac.
... Just so long as WebKit doesn't end up deviating from the standards for whichever reason, anyway. Y'know. (Yeah, I've been in this industry too long to remain optimistic, I know.)
The reason why this is such great news is that this could possibly make WebKit, one of the most standard compliant engines out there, the number one option after IE (alongside with Gecko), which will hopefully prompt Web developers to, at last, respect the standards as the basics for any Web development.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The reason Safari for Windows might actually be a serious competitor on the browser market, is because Apple has something many others have not: Talented GUI oriented developers who can add that extra "spice" that will make ordinary people actually switch IE7 with something else.
...
Think about it. People with technical insight choose FF/Opera over IE because it offers them features that IE doesn't have. People without technical insight just don't care about these features - they don't use plug-ins, skins, or strange shortcut keys.
If I were to convince "regular non-technical users" like my mother, aunt, neighbour, etc. to switch to a non-IE browser, I would need something that appealed to them. Fancy plug-ins ad strange/smart hotkeys is not what they are looking for - they want a sleek, graphically appealing and (for them) intuitive user experience.
Apple is in the business of delivering that EXACT experience! Not too many fancy settings and details, just the sleek and appealing interface that common people understand.
If Apple play their cards right, they could be a serious challenge.
Personally I'll stick with FF (on all 3 platforms I use) but I can certainly understand why the less technical "common users" would fall for the "Apple experience". They are really good at adding that extra GUI spice
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
I'd be willing to bet that a large part of that 1 million downloads is neither IE users nor FF users; rather it would be those people who run multiple browsers already for various reasons (cross-platform web development being one). We'll see what the browser market share numbers do, but I predict that there will be minimal switching going on.
Same here. I'm a browser junkie, so I had to download it. I was not impressed! I mean, I play with nightly builds of Firefox and SeaMonkey that are in better shape than the builds of Safari we've seen so far.
The only reason anyone is taking Safari seriously is because Apple is behind it. If this were just another open source project, people would have just laughed at it and forgot about it.
Even though Apple is behind it, I don't think it's a serious contender. It lacks the majority of the features which caused IE users to switch to Firefox in the first place. Why on Earth would they want to use Safari? Heck, Safari isn't even the best browser on the Mac. When I'm using a Mac, I find Camino to be a far more capable browser.
It will be nice for web developers who only have Windows boxes, and that's probably the true target user base of Safari on Windows when you think about it. I doubt Apple really thinks Safari is going to take Windows by storm. In fact, the release of the flaky beta builds (which aren't even of beta quality) should be enough proof of that. Apple is about perfection and everything working the first time, with the Safari builds I've seen so far, it's nowhere near that. I personally know of people who have had issues even getting it installed on their systems. So the articles pointing out the problems Safari on Windows has are really telling it straight. If Apple were serious about Safari on Windows, it would have just worked. That's what Apple is all about.
yeah, now those people don't need a mac to test on, so this'll reduce the number of macs sold.
Max.
Only in a Mac Land, the trolls are funny. Way to go Mac Moderators.
- It uses its own font-smoothing, so text in Safari under Windows looks different to every other application.
- It doesn't seem to have access to Windows fonts for some reason.
- If you have your taskbar set to auto-hide, you cannot access it whilst using Safari in full-screen mode
These are just a couple of points from my brief testing at work yesterday. I just thought Apple would have taken a leaf out of their own design guidelines when building an application for other OSs. I can understand Aqua, but the other points are a little strange.Or at least that is what I was told by several people numerous times in the last Safari thread. Why are end users downloading and running this "SDK" as if it is an actual browser?
Either its a browser or its an SDK. It doesn't change its role based on whether the news is good or bad.
I hope to goodness they don't bundle it with iTunes... The Quicktime/iTunes bundle is already bad enough. It's deceptive to force users to download and install iTunes if they want Quicktime (there is an alternative without it, but not to the "mainstream" user you discuss). However, since playing media is related, I don't mind so much...
But if they ever put a browser with Quicktimes/iTunes, my disdain for Apple software would turn to hatred.
'you are partially correct, firefox has a huge marketing engine the Get Firefox campaign, the ad in the NY times... etc... however'
Firefox has a marketing engine, I wouldn't exactly call it huge. I don't think you could compare even a daily full page NY times ad to even one national television commercial. More importantly, Apple has itunes/quicktime. When safari is installed by default with itunes (and based on Apple's past history it will be) every teen in the US is going to install Safari on their computer. Usually that computer is also mom and dad's computer.
It may not be quite as good as being default on the desktop but it sure beats banner ads and newspaper articles. It will also penetrate the clueless user market. They probably won't even know anything changed.
I'm always amazed at what people will download. I used to have a plug-in for Softimage|3D, the high-end animation system, on my web site. To download it, you even had to fill out a form. Yet thousands of people downloaded it, more than could possibly use it for anything. Even after I added large type warnings that you must have Softimage|3D to use this thing, there were still people downloading it. Even after Softimage|3D was discontinued.
In the same vein perhaps all of those FireFox download numbers are equally inflated. Try it out, go back to what you know.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In six years of Debian desktop use, this has hardly been an issue for me. I've done dist-upgrades for three different releases and they all worked.
Because you are using mainstream software supported by your distro provider. Which they have to do because if they didn't, stuff would keep breaking. Distros exists largely to deal with this very problem! The fact that they manage to work around the problem in a large number of cases doesn't mean there isn't an underlying problem being worked around.
> I've downloaded Safari for Windows
> I have no intention of using it as my primary browser.
> Firefox.
The thing is, Apple doesn't really want you to use Safari. Neither does Google. They are really happy with you as you are because you are already using a standards-based browser. You are a good Web citizen. You are easy to author for, easy to serve in the future.
However there are many people using Explorer because it came with their PC and they don't know any better. Getting those people to just try either Safari or Firefox is important because it costs so much money to develop for Explorer because of its extremely low quality. We are all doing the least common denominator stuff in the same way that ISO 9600 CD's have 8.3 file names so that they can be compatible with "everything".
> Other things like extensions also keep me using Firefox over Safari.
Absolutely. The lack of extensions in Safari is a feature. If you like extensions, use Firefox.
As long as you don't use Explorer that is bad for everyone.
Of course lots of Web developers are downloading Safari, that is the same type who knows what WWDC is and cares about what browsers are out there.
... all about to get Safari for Windows for free. It's as good as Microsoft's pre-install or maybe better since there is a moment where each user chooses the Apple product.
Consumers are going to get Safari for Windows free with their iPod and iPhone, just like they get Explorer free with their PC.
- 100 million iPod users
- 300 million iTunes for Windows users
- 400 million QuickTime for Windows users
> Safari offers two things that no other browser offers: Apple's font rendering and color space recognition of images.
In other words, publishing production standards instead of PC production standards.
This will be especially important when we have 300 dpi displays, because at that point, all of the "screen" based media becomes obsolete and the screen becomes just another print medium. We will show things in inches/cm and the computer will use as many pixels as it can. That is the whole idea behind the PDF-based graphics in Mac OS X, it's already a print medium just waiting to grow up.
Microsoft seems to have missed the memo. They're still relying on Verdana's squareness to hide their font rendering flaws. Any Adobe app has better font rendering than Windows.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .google.com - 51 errors on their minimal home page. What were you saying about standards?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.