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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."
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.'
Congratulations to Slashdot and its 1 millionth Safari 3.0 story!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I might be way off, but it seems more likely to me that Safari will be grabbing its marketshare from firefox, not IE.
Absolutly, and I think that's the only market that will really go for Safari. I'm a Mac guy, but I use Camino at home and Firefox at work. Safari doesn't have anything great that will make me switch. But, if it's bundled with itunes, I can see a lot of people who use IE because it's the default making the switch.
Thomas Galvin
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
nobody gives a shit about you, your opinion, or your blog. please die in a fire.
Unfortunately, the type of computer user that would download and evaluate different web browsers are the type of users that have likely already switched to Firefox. So if these people stick with Safari then it will be mostly at the expense of Firefox.
The majority of people I know that use Firefox do so because I either told them to download it, or I downloaded and installed it for them. They will use whatever program gives them internet access that has a convenient shortcut on their desktop or quick launch menu, and as long as webpages and stuff appear when they click on things then that's what they will use until they replace their computer.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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.
That is, supposing it gets the 10% market share from IE, and not from Firefox, for example.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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.
Nobody can know for sure, but many suspect that this isn't one million accountants and ebayers downloading Safari. It's more likely a combination of curious iPhone developers, eager Apple fanboys, and a bunch of your average browser-tier developers.
No story here.
If, of course, people keep using it.
I've downloaded Safari for Windows (twice, in fact: home and work), and while I'm keeping it around for testing (like I keep Opera around) I have no intention of using it as my primary browser.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the most basic reason is that Safari doesn't fit in with Windows that well. I'm not talking about the "look," Aqua under Windows is fine, I'm talking about the "feel." The biggest example for me is that the back/forward buttons on my mouse don't work in Safari. They do work in Firefox. Plus Safari doesn't use standard Windows shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift-] for next tab versus Ctrl-Tab, for example).
Other things like extensions also keep me using Firefox over Safari. I like AdBlock Plus and NoScript, and those just aren't available for Safari.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Well if you go back a bit they reached this number more than twice as quickly as Firefox did with their Fahrenheit 1 million campaign.
I think you're thinking of the RC releases. 1 million people downloaded FF 1.0 on the first day of release.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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 downloaded Safari right away just because it was there. I ran it, thought, oh that's nice. Maybe good for testing browser compatibility some day. Then went back to Firefox. Same thing with everyone I know who downloaded it. Certainly Safari on windows will never be anyone's primary browser. But it will certainly find uses. Testing web pages, iphone development, and of course embedding the engine in iTunes (did it use IE up til now?). Jobs claimed Safari was the best web browser on all platforms. I call BS. Even almost all mac users I know use firefox or camino because they need features and capabilities that safari just doesn't have. As far as features go, Safari is at the very back of the pack (worst). Even IE 7 is much better in terms of extensions, core feature set. Safari for Windows is the Steve Jobs reality distortion field at its finest.
I do love how Safari for windows uses the nicer Cocoa font rendering. Really makes Windows' native font rendering look blocky and horrible. Does anyone know how to tweak freetype on linux to render the fonts closer to OS X? I already have hinting turned off and that helps, but the contrast of the fonts still isn't right (OS X fonts render a bit heavier, which I like on the screen).
I also personally don't mind the cocoa widgets either. Cocoa looks nice and is highly functional. That's all I care about. Although it definitely would look very out of place on Vista. But on XP, I think it's fine.
It seems more likley to me, that a casual user who is just roaming along using IE today and blissfully unaware of Firefox would be more likley to stuble upon or otherwise install Safari - especially if it's installed as part of the iPhone setup, but even just normal Apple marketing may reach them. Firefx users might rty it but are less likley to switch since it offers less over what they already have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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
There! I said it.
My uncle is a transvestite you insensitive clod!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
All your other blue-eyed optimism aside, this is particularly funny:
and won't go thunk in the night when Bill Gates "upgrades" things to break your work
You know, it's really open source software that's known for making arbitrary upgrades that break backwards compatibility (and keeping version numbers below 1 so they have an excuse - hey, it's just beta!), while Windows goes to great pains to preserve backwards compatibility at all costs, even at the detriment of the system as a whole.
Then the same half a million downloaded it again the next day for the bug fixes.
There's nothing wrong with anything - Phillip J. Fry
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.
l
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.htm
What kind of nonsense is this?
If you build a standards-compliant website, it will work in IE. It won't be broken. It may have some layout differences, but it will work. So, what's all this crap about people not being able to use your website if you code to standards? It's more likely to break for everybody else if you ignore standards and build in IE-specific stuff.
Also, non-IE users make up a lot more than 15% of the market. you must have a pretty skewed audience there if you have 85% of users on IE.
... and then they built the supercollider.