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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.
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.
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.
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.
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