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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."

4 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. It may be even better than that. by Balinares · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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.

    ... 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.)

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    1. Re:It may be even better than that. by Balinares · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Several things there.

      1) De-facto standards, where a given arbitrary product is the reference, and codified standards, as described for open implementation, are VASTLY different things. Can you tell why? (Here's a hint: the answer contains the words 'lock-in'. I'll let you ponder that while ruing the lack of Firefox and XUL user base.)

      2) However, reference implementations are a good thing, because they, as you rightly point out, help developers. Not providing a reference implementation of CSS is possibly the biggest mistake the W3C made.

      3) In a perfect world, you'd be using just whatever the hell you want and it would make no matter. Gecko lock-in is not much better than IE lock-in. (Case in point: browse the commit logs of other browsers and count how many entries there are that go, "Emulate Firefox bug such-and-such so as to display somesite.com correctly". Seriously.)

      And lastly,

      4) I am slightly annoyed that you seem to assume I don't know about Web development. Because, meanwhile, in the real world, our issue tracking system is littered with tickets that read something like:

      "Dear Mr. Important-customer-at-huge-company,
      The issue you report looks like a bug in Internet Explorer. We'll allocate developer ressources to implement a work around for the next revision of the product. Kind regards, etc..."

      This costs money. This costs resources that could be allocated to building better mousetraps, to make awesome shit, to create stuff to be proud of and to drive things ahead. Instead... Working in this field today is trying to build castles on swamps, and it's a daily struggle to not cave in and just sell shaky wooden shacks (painted cheap gold as per marketing's instructions) like the rest of 'em.

      And this is not something I can do anything about.

      However, you can.

      Will you, in all consciousness, make the choice to be part of the problem? That choice is yours and yours only.

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  2. Apples extra spice ... by SplatMan_DK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ...

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  3. Re:Competition by Doctor+Crumb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.