Safari browser, Mac OS usage numbers grow
updated 01:50 pm EST, Mon November 7, 2005
Safari, Mac OS usage gains
Apple's Safari Web browser and the open-source , a provider of Web-based applications that measure, monitor and market Web sites for Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SME). The firm said that over the last 12 months, Apple's Safari browser is now the No. 3 browser in the market, showing steady growth in browser usage and made gains each and every month. One year ago, Safari held 1.46 percent of the market, while October 2005 numbers showed that it grew by over 70 pecent to 2.5 percent marketshare.
"While recent reports have Apple Macintosh share growing to 2.5 percent of total PCs shipped, Net Applications HitsLink reports that the Mac OS is up to 3.87 percent usage market share for October 2005."
Overall numbers show that Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market just over 86.5 percent marketshare. Firefox (8.59%) and Safari (2.56%) were No. 2 and No. 3, respectivley, while Netscape (.126%), Opera (0.54%), and Other (0.53%) rounded out the top 4 browser.
Reversing the short downward trend, Net Applications said that Firefox's market share started to climb again, propelled by Mozilla's recent announcement that Firefox had achieved its 100,000,000th download. Firefox averaged just over 8.5 percent of the browser usage market share throughout October.
"Firefox enjoyed a tremendous first six months of 2005, starting at 2.69% market share in January and peaking at 8.71% in June, with its crescendo of 8.65% in the final week of October," observed Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing and strategic relationships at NetApplications.
"The other notable activity in October may be more of a hardware market share story. Apple's Safari continues to gain momentum and simultaneously, HitsLink market share data also shows the Mac OS following a similar growth path. The numbers indicate larger consumer operating system usage over new PC shipments, suggesting that either Mac users hold on to their computers longer than Windows based system owners do, or that Mac users browse the internet significantly more. When the iPod's success is combined with Macintosh market share gains, it appears that Apple is definitely on the right growth path."
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numbers?
those numbers seem way off. Between all of my sites, MSIE usage is beween 40-65%. No where near 86%. On my most heavily trafficed sites, Firefox is up to about 42%. And of course its hard for me to gage Safari traffic since I skew the h*** out of those numbers every time i visit the site while developing them :-)