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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.
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.
...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.
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
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.
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.