According to data collected by Net Applications’ “Market Share,” Apple Computer’s Safari Web browser continues to gain market share in the Internet browser segment. In December 2005, Safari’s market share was 3.07%. In December 2006, Safari’s market share stood at 4.24%. The rise from 3.07% to 4.24% represents a year-over-year growth of 38.11% for the month of December.
Safari experienced a 5.21% increase from November 2006 rising from 4.03% to 4.24% in December 2006. Safari is a Mac OS X-only browser.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser continues to lose share, dropping below 80% to stand at 79.64% in December 2006. In December 2005, Internet Explorer’s market share was 85.05%. The fall from 85.05% to 79.64% represents a year-over-year loss of 6.36% for the month of December.
Firefox went from 9.57% in December 2005 to 14.0% in December 2006, a 46.29% increase year-over-year.
Net Applications’ December 2006 “Market Share” for browsers stats here.
[UPDATE: 11:35pm EST: Corrected IE year-over-year percentage drop. Thanks, Math Matters.]
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Computerworld: Apple’s Safari is best Web browser for Mac users – December 07, 2006
Apple Safari web browser market share passes 4% milestone, up 45% year-over-year – December 01, 2006
Apple’s Safari browser market share up 53-percent year-over-year, shows accelerating growth – November 01, 2006
Yeah, baby! Taking back the web, one switcher at a time.
Its the only one I need now. It wasn’t always like that, but the world is catching up!
CRAP!!! almost had first post.
Don’t forget that many Mac users are using multiple browsers to get around poorly made websites. Not as much so for windows pcs.
The article states that, “Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser continues to lose share…”
Let’s all just hope that trend continues.
MaWo, ‘moment’. As in, ‘There was one when IE mattered; But now…’ LOL
Internet Explorer will always be the browser of choice for computer-illiterate morons who believe “the Internet” is “the blue E”.
I use Safari for 99.9% of what I need to do on the net. But I use Firefox to access sites that do nothing but make the beach ball spin in Safari.
a few yrs ago, i was stunned at how fast safari loaded pages. over time, it became slower and very sluggish and i seldom used it. i thought it was my fault because i was using os 10.2.8 and couldn’t update.
after recieving my maxed out macbook, i decided to give safari another try.
and guess what? firefox still blows it away loading pages. firefox rocks!
Safari is pretty damn good. The steady web share increases are verygood news!
Shiira is quite nice, but needs to be more stable.
If you want faster page loading, check out OpenDNS.
Basically, you set your router to connect to the OpenDNS servers, which caches web pages. Sites load faster and it also filters evil sites. It also blocks phishing sites, so the amount of spam I get has dropped also. It’s worth trying.
http://www.opendns.com/
Safari sucks ass and it will never take off. Apple should just put Firefox on Macs.
I like Safari better than anything out there. It’s much faster than firefox and it looks better. It has a bit of style that the other browsers lack.
The only thing that I hate is IE only web sites! GARR!
IE share will continue to go down as new Vista/IE 7 loaded PCs won’t work with IE 6 websites. Windows users will need an alternative, and the only viable alternative for Windows users (other than getting a Mac) is to start using Firefox.
if you come across ie only sites, send these stats to the webmaster, sales@, tech@, anyone you can in the company and have a bitch about it. its the only way to change some people.
Safari is my browser of choice under MacOS X as I like the simplicity and have grown to like the way the bookmarks work. However, it remains buggy – crashing not infrequently and still suffers from some kind of memory leak that causes its memory usage to grow over time. Hopefully the new automated garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0 coming out with Leopard will fix the memory leak issues automatically and improve stability…
I hope Safari 3 will have some features that other browsers have had for years.
It could warn me if I’m closing a window that has tabs open.
Bookmarking the tabs.
Little things.
That made my day already
Safari is by far and away the best OSX browser. Sheer elegance, speed, style. I love it. And today, I have no sites that need another browser.
Designers are taking notice of Safari. Come to think of it, all the best designed sites are made on Macs anyway.
Safari is tripe, a browser fit only for cement heads who can’t crawl out from under the previous century and who are more clueless than a bag of hammers. They are Apple’s version of Windoze drones who think IE is the web.
I use Safari most of the time. I have found that Camino seems to load the fastest though for me.
Would the headline be as exciting if it said, Apple share up 1.17%, Microsoft down 6.36%, Firefox up 4.43%.
Awesome, Firefox added more percentage share that the entire Apple user base.