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Safari Beta Takeup Tops Firefox, IE and Chrome
nk497 writes "The release of the beta for the next version of Apple's Safari browser last week helped drive Apple's market share above ten per cent. The Safari beta has gained users at a rate of about 0.5 per cent a day since its release, topping one per cent by day four. For comparison, Microsoft's beta of IE took six months to hit one percent, Chrome needed almost a month, and Firefox 3 took a week."
Until they fix the title-bar abuse, I'm sticking with Safari 3.
Safari is broken, it can't even load hotmail
about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I don't think that kind of thing is actually meaningful at all. Sure, they are gaining more people to try out their beta. The issue is with whether they'll be able to keep them.
Look at Google Chrome; the browser's first few weeks were all rosy as people flocked to the browser. After a few months, though, things got back to "normal" and users went back to their usual browser after the hype machine had died down and the novelty wore off. If they can get that percentage and KEEP it, then we can say they've achieved something.
"There are now at least 85,000 Elvis's around the world, compared to only 170 in 1977 when Elvis died. At this rate of growth, experts predict that by 2019 Elvis impersonators will make up a third of the world population." - The Naked Scientists 3rd December, 2000.
I think the reason behind this is due to trust. Specifically, trust in the "it just works" history that Apple currently enjoys. Mac users are used to that, expect it, and believe that something like a new Safari will actually work and may even perform as advertised. They're willing to give it a try at an early stage. I did: I'm typing this reply now in the Safari beta. And hey, it does Just Work, at least so far.
Now, I'm not saying that Apple always deserves that level of trust. They've made mistakes in the past, some of them real doozies. But in general, the average Mac user has a fairly high regard for Apple products. More so than Microsoft users for Windows products, certainly.
Didn't Google Chrome get 3% market share in like a day or something? Here's the /. story on that:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/03/1343226
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Apple update doesn't push Safari 4 - you have to go to the apple website and download and install it yourself.
The central claim of the summary is completely unsourced. If you click on the link in the article that purports to backup the claim of a 10% market share (which sounds outlandish to me, but not impossible), you get a pretty run of the mill domain name parking page. So, there's no way of examining the claim or questioning the methods. This doesn't belong on the front page.
How many of these new users actually even know they are new users ? I bet the majority of them are idiots who just click on the apple update for their itunes/ipod and done even realise Apple are basicaslly pushing crap onto their PCs that they done even know or want.
Zero. This is a beta release and is not distributed via software update yet. You have to go to Apple's Web site and download it.
That's a disturbing moniker...
"Safari for Windows 3.2"
you aren't Chinese by any chance? If you are we'll have to tell your masters you've been hacking the great Firewall...
fyi
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
...the KDE folks would "dump" KHTML for Webkit. I just mean "default to Webkit in Konqueror." Such a move would raise Konqueror's profile which cannot be a bad thing.
Right now, Konqueror is a non issue when it comes to browser statistics on the internet. In some statistics, it is lumped like other browsers into the "other" category like here . And over here , Konqueror is missing all together! Sad indeed.
While I say this, I know egos are high in the Open Source world, so what I am suggesting has little chance of being adopted.
Now, before I get modded a troll, I would like to know whether what I am suggesting is a very bad thing.
Plus, these statistics are not based on downloads, but on usage. If it were based on installation, IE would likely have a far stronger showing.
- oZ
// i am here.
SquirrelFish Extreme was unveiled about a week after Google unveiled Chrome and V8. If you're going to whine about Safari putting tabs on top like Chrome, you could say that Google stole Opera's UI.
- oZ
// i am here.
It did, and then dropped back to near zero as people said "that's pretty good" and then went back to their regular browsers.
Actually, it just did when I just updated iTunes about 15 minutes ago. I do NOT have Safari on this machine and it had ticked Safari as a 23MB (iirc) 'update' that was in the bottom half of the dialog off on its own. Nice of them to check mark that download for my own good, eh? ;)
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The problem with both Chrome and Safari is a lack of an add-on community. One of the things that continues to make Firefox a success is that the user community has added all the niche functionality anyone would ever want and more.
My blog
You and the GGP obviously didn't read the summary.
Yay! This is fun! Quick, somebody, tell me what I obviously forgot to read!
It looks to me like all they've done is rework Safari to make it emulate Chrome.
They pulled in a much, much newer version of Webkit including the new javascript engine Chrome does not use. They added a huge amount of support for HTML 5, CSS 3, XML, SVG 1.1 and a lot of other cool, new technologies that have been languishing. They added resolution independent zoom, anti-phishing, and revamped their plug-in architecture. Those speed and functional improvements are the major items in my mind. They changed up the UI and the tabs are more similar to Chrome, as is the default start page, but neither is quite the same and while more visible at first blush, are pretty minor.
So, you could use Safari and get the features of Chrome at a larger memory footprint or you could just run Chrome.
Or, if you're running OS X you can't run Chrome because they haven't even released a version yet.
. Chrome isn't as full featured as Safari, but covers 95% of what people need for normal web browser.
If you're on Windows I'd argue Safari isn't your best choice as a browser... but then that is not Safari's main market. On OS X it crushes most of the competition including Firefox. It is fast and has features that have not been cloned yet. You seem to take issue with browsers cloning the innovations of others, I wish other browser makers would do it. Every time I find myself on a Windows box using any other browser I wish I could expand text boxes (like the one I'm typing in now) to be able to see my whole comment. It's been years now.
about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
So, they started out with -1% market share?
I wrote a long post which appears to have been eaten. In summary:
Even allowing for rounding, the growth per day must be less than 0.26125%. Their other statistics are quoted accurately, indeed, to not just 1, but 2 decimal places. There is no way it is reasonable to represent the growth as "almost 0.5%" per day.
I'm not sure how we can trust an article that doesn't get basic maths right.
Secondly, their article is a blatant lie - the original source http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 lists Safari as 7.42% (the other browsers are all reported accurately).
If you actually paid attention, you'd be able to tell that that wasn't the Safari 4 Beta, but just an update to Safari 3.
As several others have noted in this thread (whom you apparently ignored), you have to deliberately go out and download the Safari 4 Beta from Apple's website.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
"Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue... AAY!"
-Disco Stu
Qt already ships with WebKit as of Qt 4.4, released a while ago. Mind you, I don't consider it usable yet, seeing as the included WebKit is a little dated and lacks such features as, you know, Netscape plugin support (so no Flash).
Qt 4.5 will ship a more recent and useful version of WebKit, however, with support for such things as W3C selectors API, 100% ACID3 compliance, HTML5 audio and video, CSS canvas drawing, masks and reflections, and a few more things.
Nevertheless, KHTML is still set to remain Konqueror's default rendering engine, as far as I understand, for reasons of trust, quite simply. I don't necessarily agree, mind you, but I do understand, if nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
Mind you, this is KDE, so switching to WebKit by default is probably one setting away. Probably in Configure file associations > text/html > Embedding, move webkitpart to the top of the preferred service list. I'm going to do that right away, actually.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Mostly likely you got a Safari 3 update not the Safari 4 beta.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Actually (and I just checked), but Safari 3.2.1 (on Leopard, at least) displays the name of the extended validation cert owner next to the lock icon in the top right corner.
CSS Animation! and other CSS and HTML5 goodies!
http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/
Hate Apple all you want, at least when it comes to the web they care about standards.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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They did compare it to Fx 3.1
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
While it's fair enough to say that, I've found that "Just Works" principle applies to all major OS distributions (well, except my first few Gentoo installs). Apple's marketing compaign for "It Just Works" generally works by the principle of "Anything that Might Not Work We Disabled." That said, the Safari 4 beta seems interesting, and I've heard good things about it, but I, for one, shall not buy into this "It Just Works" ethos when I download it. Which I shall do subsequent to this post.
quicktime - the most reprehensible video codec ever - it's almost as bad as malware with all the crap that installs with it - even when you tell it not to.
itunes for pc - egads - how many times do you have to say no - don't install this or that, and watch it try to install anyway. again - malware grade software installer
safari - crashed multiple systems, and couldn't open basic sites - will never install another version - ever - oh - the calling home stuff built into it - on par with the latest botnet.
osx - how many macs have been bricked by faulty updates? more than apple would like you to know...
apple hardware - at a minimum 4 times more expensive than it should be - just for a name or apple logo? hardly worth it...
It's a shame that on Apple stories, the mods abuse negative mods for things they disagree with - it's the only category I have to browse at -1.
I haven't used Safari, but I am in full agreement with the rest, especially Quicktime. Given how people rightly dislike things like Realplayer here on Slashdot, why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive, and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode? Oh, because it's Apple, and they're held to a different standard.
This reminds me of when someone was repeating the "Just Works" mantra, and claiming that whenever he uses Windows to do things like watching a video, there's always things about it that distracts him from just trying to get on and do it. I said I'd never experienced this, but funningly enough, I concede that that evening, I did have frustrations when trying to do something as basic as watching a video on Windows.
It was a quicktime video.
why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive
Because on the Mac it's not, and most people championing Apple are Mac users. From what I hear about QuickTime, iTunes, etc on Windows, it sounds atrocious, and I can't imagine how Apple can stand having something so horrible tarnish their "it just works" image.
and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode
This has always pissed me off though, and until OSX I kept to an older version of QuickTime Player that didn't have that disabled. (QuickTime is not a player application but a whole media framework: file formats, codecs, APIs, etc. QuickTime Player, any version, calls on the underlying QuickTime API to handle everything; so sticking to the old Player while updating the framework didn't have any negative side effects).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."