I know plenty of people that use Firefox, OmniWeb, iCab, Camino, Shiira, Opera, and other browsers that are for Mac. Safari market share is not the Mac market share.

(I personally use Camino)

..loads of mac users who use IE beause that is all they know. Sad, I know...

I never open Safari anymore.

Safari users != all Mac Users

I also use Camino. Faster and sleeker than Safari.

But if Safari use is at 3.xx%, then the Mac market share is certainly higher.

..the point.

If one is Using Safari, it is assumed he must be on Mac Hardware. Thus, a large growth in Safari use is indictivie of a growth in Mac users.

It's a minimum indicator, not a marketshare indicator. Just one happy bit of news: More people are using a web browser we know works only on Macs.

Typical Mac users are no different than typical Windows users. They use whatever came on their machine, period. Posts extolling the virtues of alternate browsers and how many friends use Firefox or Camino or Opera or whatever mean little. A tiny, small minority of Mac users use alternate browsers. The vast majority stick with what came on the machine, Safari. The growth in Safari usage is indeed a good indicator of what is going on out there. The really good news is that web site developers can no longer ignore OS X and Safari, especially if the numbers get to 5% or better.

That 3.19% number should represent the MINIMUM percentage of computer users on the 'net who are Mac users. Since I'm happily using Panther (10.3.9) on my old G4, and I can't use the latest version of Safari with Panther, I use Shiira (which is basically the latest Safari without the annoying "metal" interface). I also use Camino. My wife uses Tiger, but she prefers the old Mozilla all-in-one suite format, so uses the latest version from the SeaMonkey project.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Contrary to the "you have more software choices with Windows" myth, you have more GOOD choices with Mac OX X, especially when it comes to browsers. So that 3.19% is like to be significantly low.

there are still plenty of non-osx mac users out there also.

why not go by the user agent instead of browser???

For the most part, people who have just gotten their first Mac because that's the default browser. More experienced users may continue to use it as well but many of them will switch to Firefox or Camino. So when Safari usage increases by 65%, it may be an indication of an expanding user base. It's not a 1:1 correlation but it is a strong indication.

I am an advanced user, having used macs since the early nineties and computers in general since the eighties. Plus I'm a web designer for 11 years. I've tried all the "alternative" browsers and I do keep them on hand for testing.

Truth is, Safari is simply the best mac browser at the moment (even better with the latest WebKit builds). It's extensible, fast and renders css better than anyone.

Camino is not a viable primary browser. It's too light in terms of features. Firefox is good, but still does some distinctly un-Maclike things. Opera is EXTREMELY un-Maclike. It took me days to figure out how to get Opera 9 to open a session of tabs on startup when it forgot the setting while migrating from Opera 8. Omniweb? Is that still around? Shiira? I doubt 99% of Mac users have heard of it. All this "I know tons of people who use other browsers" is hogwash. The browser stats from my websites say otherwise.