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."

It makes me wonder...

These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 [konqueror.org] will become another large competitor on Windows. Konqueror and Safari both share a very common core (KHTML [wikipedia.org]/WebKit [webkit.org]), 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 [opera.com], 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 [kde.org] (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.

Re:It makes me wonder...

These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 [konqueror.org] will become another large competitor on Windows.

It won't. The only reason Safari took off like this is because Apple is behind it.

Re:It makes me wonder...

Took off?

Just because I downloaded the thing doesn't mean I'm going to switch to using it seriously.

Maybe I just wanted a giggle!

Re:It makes me wonder...

Exactly, I think of that 1 million the majority of them are already firefox users and they just want to test it out, see how good/bad it is.

I did download it though I'm not using it as my main browser, I don't even use it on my powerbook.

It may be even better than that.

Actually, the KDE guys (in particular, the ever awesome Zack Rusin [blogspot.com]) 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.)

Re:It may be even better than that.

If all this compliaince BS was actually to HELP developers, the OSS community would've adopted IE settings as the standard. I mean, why not?

Because the standards are there for a reason, and IE's implementation is broken. It might not be a big deal in the short-term - but if we pander to people who break the standards, where does it end? In 10 years, we have a thoroughly broken "box model" just because Microsoft uses a broken model today? It's about consistency and logic, not expedience. And if we start caving to Microsoft today, what does that bode for the future? they will just be more brazen, because they can expect any changes they make to be be added to the standards.

Re:It may be even better than that.

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.

Re:KDE 4 Konqueror KHTML

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.

Re:It makes me wonder...

You must not be a very good developer. Windows+IE7 is free for testing.

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displa ylang=en [microsoft.com]

You can convert the VPC image to the format of your VM of choice (I use VMWare Player on Linux).

Dumb speculations

"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."

If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle.

Also

Congratulations to Slashdot and its 1 millionth Safari 3.0 story!

Competition

I might be way off, but it seems more likely to me that Safari will be grabbing its marketshare from firefox, not IE.

Re:Competition

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.

Oh come on

If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users...

I think a very large number of people, including myself, downloaded it just to see what it was like and have no intention of actually using it.

Re:Oh come on

Yeah. I almost downloaded it just because I was curious of how Safari would look on Windows. (I stopped the download when I started reading about how this was a real Beta and not a release candidate build that we (as of late) have called Beta.)

Perhaps Apple will make Safari an optional download when people download quicktime or iTunes. If so, they will likely get a lot of IE converts.

While a couple years ago I would have said that they would not get a lot of Firefox users. But since Firefox is now mainstream, they will likely get a lot of converts from people that think the Firefox icon is for the internet and have no idea what an application really is.

Unfortunately...

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

Flawed assumption

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.

1M downloads != 1M users

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.

Downloads aren't users

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.

And Uninstalled 1 million times

There! I said it.

Half a million downloaded it...

Then the same half a million downloaded it again the next day for the bug fixes.

How Apple cheated on benchmarks

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.

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.html [howtocreate.co.uk]

Re:Excellent news :-)

A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.

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.

Re:Excellent news :-)

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.

Re:Excellent news :-)

That's almost as many downloads as firefox got in its first 24 hrs.

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.

A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.

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.