Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times 439
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... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Excellent news :-) (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I downloaded it... (Score:2, Informative)
Safari & XP64 not in love ? (Score:3, Informative)
See by yourself: Screen shot [cabuzel.net]
Safari : not just for iPhone? (Score:2, Informative)
I hate to admit it, but john Dvorak had an interesting theory[1]. Google pays the mozilla foundation $50 million/year or so for redirecting searches their way. I believe Google also had a deal with Opera (the latest version of Opera seems to default to yahoo, though). Is google paying Apple for Safari searches? If so, a windows port could bring in $10 million/year easily, enough to pay for the port and subsidize continued development.
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:4, Informative)
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 :-) (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're thinking of the RC releases. 1 million people downloaded FF 1.0 on the first day [mozillazine.org] of release.
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:It makes me wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Just because I downloaded the thing doesn't mean I'm going to switch to using it seriously.
Maybe I just wanted a giggle!
My experience with Safari (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It makes me wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
You can convert the VPC image to the format of your VM of choice (I use VMWare Player on Linux).
Safari's fonts, color space support (Score:3, Informative)
The color space stuff is a big deal to photographers, and it's very annoying that no other browser seems to respect the ICC color profile in images. I've seen a lot of discussion about Firefox versus Safari on the Mac and why Firefox seems to "wash out" images. It's really a shame Firefox doesn't respect ICC color profiles, it's such an obvious thing for a browser to do.
So maybe yeah, Safari isn't as "powerful" as Firefox or MSIE. But it offers an easy-to-use, standards-compliant browsing experience with a level of display rendering not found in other browsers. Many people may not be impressed, but just as many may find it more to their liking. Time will tell.
Not true (Score:3, Informative)
What the hell are you tlkaing about?
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:3, Informative)
> as the standard. I mean, why not?
Because this would require cooperation from Microsoft and they do not cooperate.
The WebKit and Gecko programmers work together on standardization. For example, WebKit introduced the canvas tag which is used in Mac Widgets, and Gecko implemented this also, however during the standardization process, the way the canvas tag "should" work was changed, and then WebKit adjusted its own canvas tag behaviors to match the standards.
In other words, after canvas was standardized, the WebKit team did a bunch of work to implement the standard canvas tag, even though they themselves had invented the non-standard version. You are not going to see Microsoft do this kind of thing.
If you look at Safari's user-agent string it says "like Gecko"
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:2, Informative)
WebKit and Gecko have quirks modes to work around the bad content on the Web, but they are not mimicking IE they are moving quickly towards HTML5.
You can author a Web site while testing only in Firefox and then go look in Safari and if your code is valid you will see the same thing. There are no other browsers where this is true. It is because the WebKit and Gecko teams work both together and using standards.
Re:It makes me wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
How Apple cheated on benchmarks (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.htm
Re:It makes me wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I downloaded it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:standards are not bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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.
no, standards are about cooperation & free mar (Score:1, Informative)
YOU CAN YELL ALL YOU WANT, BUT YOU ARE STILL WRONG