Is anybody using Safari for Windows? Yes, they are – as evidenced by our own site’s usage stats.
We ran stats on our visitors’ browsers and operating systems for two specific time periods, June 1-10 (pre-Safari for Windows launch) and June 12-13 (through 1pm EDT today, post-Safari launch).
Interesting trends showed significant gains for Safari for Macintosh and, of course, Safari for Windows and significant losses for Internet Explorer for Windows, Firefox for Windows, and Firefox for Macintosh.
51% of all Safari users visiting MacDailyNews between June 12-13 (as of 1pm EDT) used Safari 3 Public Beta, 49% used previous versions of Safari.
MacDailyNews.com visitors’ browsers and operating systems:
June 1-10:
Safari / Macintosh – 54.02%
Internet Explorer / Windows – 15.23%
Firefox / Windows – 14.32%
Firefox / Macintosh – 10.92%
Camino / Macintosh – 1.83%
June 12-13:
Safari / Macintosh – 57.75% (+3.37)
Internet Explorer / Windows – 12.56% (-2.67)
Firefox / Windows – 11.67% (-2.65)
Firefox / Macintosh – 8.91% (-2.01)
Safari / Windows – 3.97% (+3.97)
Camino / Macintosh – 1.79% (-0.04)
Visits to MacDailyNews between June 1-June 13 (1pm EDT) remained consistent with our normal OS breakdowns, approximately 75% Mac OS X users (currently evenly split between PPC- and Intel-powered Macs) and 25% Windows users.
Admittedly, the timeframe we can measure for Safari for Windows is very short, so we’ll revisit this exercise in the near future.
I just reverted to Safari 2 on the Mac – the 3 beta is way too buggy to be usefull. I hate the dark highlighting too. Oh, and it forgets your autofill form info… not very good.
Interesting. What is the percentage of? 1,000 visitors? 10,000 visitors? 100,000 visitors? 1,000,000 visitors? Just curious to know.
I guess those 4% are closet Mac fans.
The real test is not whether it goes up short-term… that’s to be expected with people toying around with it, trying it out, and so on. The real test is whether those people continue to use it as their primary browser (or at least one of their primary browsers) once the initial “Ooh, new Safari!” and “Ooh, Safari on Windoze!” reactions wear off and people start missing their Firefox extensions and whatnot.
If you are going to use the Beta, be sure to remove any 3rd party InputManager or SImbl type products, as they are not yet compatible. Otherwise crashes occur.
Wish Apple had “sandboxed” the Beta, allowing both 2.0.4 and 3 to run concurrently. Would make for an easier Beta process.
Like any other Apple product, I’ll wait for an update or two for the bugs and kinks to get worked out, first.
Part of the reason is because there are mac users like myself that are forced to use windows at work. We downloaded Safari as soon as we could. I’ve been using it as much as possible just to do my small part to drive Ballmer over the brink.
well, since Safari for Windows release..the very I installed it on two of my companies PC…and currently I am at working writing this post in Safari on a Dell Crapper…go figure..
home though is a different story..I still use Safari 2 on my Mac.
The Windows/Safari crowd (if I may call 3.7% a crowd) is almost certainly those of us who are forced to use Windows at work but are Mac/Safari at home. As ‘Apple’ as we can be!
Strange, Safari 3 Beta works for me. Looks the same as 2. On one of my Macs the QuickTime didn’t work. I went to the Library in Macintosh HD and moved the QuickTime Plugin.webplugin to the desktop, re-opened Safari 3. Works fine. Replaced the QT Plugin to its original place. So far, so good.
Love the Find Banner and dragging a tab from one window to the next. Works really well.
Home Mac users forced to use Windows at work now using Safari at work.
Unfortunately Safari/Windows is pretty buggy. I get no text and cannot enter URLs.
I’ve been using Safari 3 since Monday on my new MacBook core 2 duo. I’m in that metric that was using Firefox 2 before Monday.
I’ve had mixed, but generally good results with Safari 3. I really like all the new features. It is buggy though. (Beta by definition.)
I tried Dan Eran’s Roughly Drafted site, and it was horribly hobbled in Safari 3. So, I returned to Firefox, where his site worked just fine.
Ah, to be pioneers on the digital frontier, sometimes we must suffer the slings and arrows of ghosts in the machine.
I will continue to “A/B” test both browsers and look forward to Safari 3 Golden Master in the not too distant future.
MW: ‘death’ — death = change, and that ain’t bad!
I’ve been using Safari/Mac 3.0 as my primary browser with no problems. Also installed on a XP machine and that went smoothly.
Safari sure is getting a bad rap from some people, but I guess that’s no different that before anyway. For me, it remains the best browser I’ve used in terms of web standards adherence and usability. Camino is a very, very close second.
I moved to safari 3.0 on my windows XP from Firefox.
Using Safari3 on 15″ PB G4, consistently for the last two days. 1 crash. No memory leak, good performance. Helps a lot with all the ad crap on MDN which used to slow me down so much (though I accept it as a necessary evil)
Some small reversions to bugs with various webcams.
..and the IE Windows group are all trolls posting their usual high quality trash..!
Safari/Win is on my mini in Parallels. Seems to run fine – I ran into none of the problems cited by our Win bretheren. Odd, that…
Installed it on my g5 PM at home and my HP windows box at work. No problems or issues to resolve so far. It’s a metric s#$t ton faster than safari 2 or opera, and so far-knock on wood-it’s stable.
I’m running and updating adaware and spybot on my machines at work to see if Safari 3 picks up any windows malware. Sadly enough, I was even picking some up browsing on the latest version of opera.
BTW, the Redmond fanbois have really been picking S3 apart on the forums at Digg…
ZuneTang has secretly switched to Safari as well…….
@ digirati
“I tried Dan Eran’s Roughly Drafted site, and it was horribly hobbled in Safari 3. So, I returned to Firefox, where his site worked just fine.”
Oh, now that’s odd, because if you look at those tell-tale URLs and the source-code of the pages, you can see Dan builds it with iWeb.
One’s tempted to say: If Safari can’t render something written in iWeb right … however, I just went there in Safari for Windows to check, and it’s just fine for me. In fact it looks slightly better than on my Mac, since the screen is a slightly higher resolution on my Windows box.
I’m not sure why you’d be getting a problem while I’m not. I wonder if it’s down to plug-ins.
What I _did_ get when I launched Safari this time was a tiny tiny window. Safari on Windows seems to re-size itself occasionally for no reason that I can tell–often on launch.
On the whole I like it very much.
25% of visitors are on Windows, isn’t that interesting! How many do you thing are Mac users at work stuck on a PC, how many are potential switchers and how many are FUD spreaders?
Yeah, people testing out the new software, and people visiting an Apple-centric site.
Non-news.
Stefano, digirati,
I’m on a MBP and Safari 3 and RDM is perfectly rendered. Only difference is that it’s a bit quicker than 2.
Where do all these differences come from???
@digirati
You say RoughlyDrafted doesn’t show properly in Safari beta 3 on your MBP, but it works just fine in beta 3 (522.11) for me.
Do you have addons, plugins, haxies, etc. running?
Well I’m using Safari 3 at work (when I can) on a Dell. I’m hoping to use it to keep the companies website in shape. (We use Visual Studio…) So I’m very glad it came out.
keyword: ‘hours’ so i can pass all these hours WITHOUT IE
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Seriously guys, this is a Mac focused website. Many mac users also own a PC, others with only a PC come here for news because they are either ipod/itunes fans and/or are thinking of making the switch. This is the LAST place we should look for real-world data on safari for windows usage. What I am saying is, many of the readers here are much more likely to try safari for windows. That makes sense right? I sure hope so.. let’s give it 3-6 months and wait for a report on usage that samples 1000’s of sites. Cool? Cool! Now, give me my 2 min back, thanks!
I really like being able to drag the tabs off the tab bar and make new windows, besides being able to reorder the tabs of course. Pretty cool.
And WOW! I just figued out that if you have another window with two+ tabs open, you can drag one of its tabs off and add it as a tab into the first window (in effect the reverse of tearing a tab off as a separate window).
Did any of that make sense?
The Apple fan takes it and then spreads it to the rest of the world. iPod was the same way. Check out the documentary on iPod on Youtube.
So we will spread it the same way, I just hope that it works well with on the many crappy PCs out there, since Apple probably use only Mac hardwares for testing.
Hey! Look at me!
I made the 1.79 percentile!
Woo Hoo!!!
I’ve been using Safari on Windows since Monday evening (and using it to write this right now), and except for the very first startup, I have not crashed since (with Bonjour off).
When I turn Bonjour on, I have hung several times. Don’t know why.
I love Safari for PC. It is much faster than IE and FF on my machines. The text looks a lot better with Apple’s rendering engine. The size-able text boxes help, and the find on page feature is fantastic.
No crashes here, works great. However, it was kinda funny how when I set it to be the ‘default web browser’ the IE7 icon on the desktop started loading Safari and eventually turned itself into a Safari icon. Now I have no icon on the desktop to start IE7.
Funny, that (resizing text box to see my entire post)
mark
let me get this, uh, straight.
You are not hung when your Bonjour is off?
IDEA: Include the link to the SAFARI browser download in your e-mail signature lines to encourage others to download and use Safari:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
I just uninstalled 3. It didn’t get along with 1Password.
we all know this is false, since, as many FUDsters said the day of release, even Mac users don’t use safari! everyone is on firefox! yeah that is it!
…oh and old builds of IE. …..and mosaic. yeah, mosaic!
it is a shame MDN ha to make up numbers like that!
(this post written in lynx)
Well since Safari 3 crashed on install and now I can’t launch ANY packages at all, I’ve gone back to using the Netscape Navigator 9.0b1 (beta) and I hardly ever get the spinning beach ball when I have heaps of tabs open. Unlike Safari 2 which would slow to a crawl, but now the Safari 3 has hosed my old Safari, not that I care too much.
Better stats are needed. I use a Mac at home and am trying Safari 3 and I upgraded my work PC from FireFox to Safari too. I’ve had very little not work. SIMBL and Saft give a warning and do not load – a pretty civilized approach I feel.
Overall very good for BETA software.
In fact the only problem I have is – just how do you clean the little ball in a mighty mouse? It’s only scrolling up and not down.
to be honest, someone visiting macdailynews isnt going to be the average windows user. Will be a mac user who happens to have a pc.
Digg it:
http://digg.com/apple/MacDailyNews_sees_shift_to_Safari_for_Windows_visitors
At work, administrator privileges are required to install Safari. This means the numbers could be larger in favor of Safari if privileges weren’t required.
Interestingly, installation of Opera browser does not require Admin. privileges.
Now why don’t I show up in the statistics?:-) I’m using Ubuntu :inux with Firefox. Well I suppose I’ll just have to order a Macbook Pro then. In fact I just did:-)
Makes sense, since people coming to MDN would be people interested in Apple. If they happen to be Windows users, they are more likely to want to try something new from Apple.
Safari 3 beta works excellent for me with 0 crashes. Apple did a good Job.
Intriguing survey.
Personally, Camino is my browser of choice. I don’t get the mentality of using (needing) more than one browser at a time – but to each their own.
I did however check out the Safari 3 beta on my MacBook Pro, and man, was it zippy! It seemed to work well – minus the occasional gross distrortion of some websites (Apple’s own site included!
To clarify, ‘distortion’ in the sense of rendering images and text all over the place, and not sizing the page to fit the window frame. The problem appeared to rectify after quitting and opening the browser again, at least.
And the Windows users viewing MDN is probably like a ‘guilty pleasure’ for them, huh?
Safari 3 won’t even launch on my MBP.
Oh dear. Am I part of the the 1.87% that uses Camino? What the rest of you are missing out on. My interface looks orgasmically good. Time to step up MDN users.
Threaded Javascript!!! It’s also much faster than Safari 2.
I haven’t noticed any of the rendering problems that others have run into!?
haha…
I have two macs, but at my fiancee’s place she only uses a PC for that darn MSN….everyone in china uses msn
Thats why I use safari on this windows machine.
Netscape 9 will kill all other browsers. Mark my words.
Safari seems to be the worst quality browser ever released.
Dozens of exploits and crashes already. “betas” of this scale are usually of much better tested software. It seems like this one was pushed out to a larger audience a bit too early.
John’s comment (at the top) re his decision to revert back to Safari 2x rings familiar. . . same here. Except that, in the 30-odd hours I ran Safari 3 my G5 was apparently exploited at some point, making the reinstall of Safari 2 a disappointing experience.
Whatever damage had been done to my system was deeply-enough embedded to prevent Safari 2, once reinstalled, from remembering stored name / password data and from placing web site icons in the Bookmarks folder.
At last, after ripping out every trace of Safari 3 (using Easy Find) and reinstalling the old version 2, and even after re-running the OS X v10.4.9 PPC update and all subsequent Java and security updates to no avail, I was forced to capitulate and reinstall OS X.
That’s what I get for succumbing to the temptation to use a beta-level browser merely because it wears the Apple logo.
Let us hope that Safari-the-finished-product will be more secure in Leopard 10.5x. I believe this will surely be true, which bodes good fortune not only for Macintosh users but for afficionados of the Windows platform as well.
Yeah these are Mac users on Windows at work. This should help prove there are more Mac users than is reported on stats to show Mac marketshare. I’d be curious to know how many mainly Mac Users get counted on statistics as Mac then they get counted again when they are at work on Windows. Lets say NetApplications counts five Mac users, five Windows users 10 so far. The Mac users go to work hit the site and get counted at Windows, now 15. It would appear, Mac marketshare would be a third when it is really half.
I put it on my XP box that I have, the UI is so much better than Firefox.
And you got to have your head checked if you’re using IE. That’s like having unprotected anal sex with an intravenous drug using Swazilandian hooker.
Just don’t do it or you will get infected.