Apple’s release of Safari 4 Public Beta lifted “Safari’s market share above 10% for the first time,” Wolfgang Gruener reports for TG Daily.

“On February 28, Safari is listed with a 10.91% share, which is 1.88 points above Safari’s share on the same day in the previous week (February 21; 9.03%) and a full point above Safari’s previous market share record (February 1; 9.90%),” Gruener reports. “This gain is about in line with the trend of Safari share gains and the impact of the Safari 4 beta release.”

Gruener reports, “Safari 4 beta jumped to 0.45% market share after one day, to 0.55% on day 3 and to 1.04% on day 4. Net Applications’ market share data indicates that 1% of market share points to roughly 10 million installed browsers. Our sources at Apple mentioned that such an estimate would not be far from reality, but we were told that the number of downloaded Safari 4 packages may actually be closer to 11 million. [Safari 4 Public Beta was released last Tuesday, February 24, 2009.]“

Gruener reports, “If we try to make a prediction in Microsoft’s favor – if we exclude IE8 beta and assume that these users will become Internet Explorer users and also assume that current IE5 and IE4 users will switch to IE8, then there is at least 17% of the browser market share up for grabs, which translates into just about 25% of all Internet Explorer users Microsoft has at this time.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "sketchtrain" for the heads up.]