Safari 4 More Popular Among Window Users Than Mac Users
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 12, 2009 at 7:35 AM PT
Apple claims that Safari 4 is “the world’s fastest” Web browser. That may or may not be true, but certainly its speedy market share gains are impressive. Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of the new browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by Windows users.
More than six million downloads by Microsoft (MSFT) Windows users? That means that Safari 4, at least at the outset, is more popular on Windows than on the Mac.
Now, the former’s installed base is significantly larger, I know. But still…. Clearly, Apple’s (AAPL) 2007 decision to suggest Safari to Windows users via the iTunes software update has done great things to boost usage on that platform. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when Safari for Windows was first announced:
How are we going to distribute [Safari for Windows]? We don’t really talk to these customers, do we? There are over 500,000 downloads of Firefox a day. What are we going to do? Well, it turns out, there are over 1 million downloads of iTunes a day. As a matter of fact, there have been over a half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows Machines. Over half a billion. And so we know how to reach these customers and we are going to do exactly that.
And successfully, too.
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Comments
This article is nothing like the lurid title suggests — of course Windows users outnumber Mac users by something like 8:1 or 10:1, so there’s no rationale behind the headline. Safari, per capita, is significantly more popular among the Mac crowd than among Windows users. This is in fact reflected in the article body, but glancing at the title might well lead one to conclude that Mac users are not at all interested in Safari 4 and clearly that is not the case. A more useful title might have been “Safari 4 Garners Significant Interest From Windows Users”. I’m assuming the author did not write the title, so this is yet another example of editors injecting flames into the discussion to get hits on the web site.
Posted by Steve Peralta at June 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm