11 million Safari downloads? Um. Sort of

I get full-screen support in Safari using Saft 11.0.0. Works well.

"The World Fastest Browser". The RDF is bizzarro reality. Always give me a chuckle especially seeing that Google made a webkit browser that was faster and more stable in its beta release vs what Apple could with it in 4 iterations. And the fact that they put their B-Team of dev's on the Chrome release for OSX.

the only issue is full screen browsing? If you look at Paul's blog - the most traffic (comments) are the ones that are talking about Apple. Why not rename this WinSuperAppleSite? Clearly the Apple posts are for the "Dvorak" effect. Oh, that's right, I remember why it cannot be renamed..

yert "Safari sans shady updating is still more popular then Opera." I'm not sure but I think the Commodore 64 is still more popular than Opera.

"I'm not sure but I think the Commodore 64 is still more popular than Opera." I think a kick in the head is more popular than Opera. Er.... I think opera is more popular than Opera.

""Yeah, but at least we can all agree Safari sans shady updating is still more popular then Opera." Not in the mobile space." You got any stats on that? My web logs would indicate otherwise.

Haven't Apple been in trouble before with pushing Safari onto people's computers through the Apple Software Update? I've been using Safari 4 for 2 weeks now. I'm quite liking it and I'm thinking of using it as my permanent browser for the meantime. My reason for the choice has nothing to do with speed or anything (I don't really notice that much of a difference between browsers) because I much prefer the UI than of Chrome or Firefox. As for IE, I had to change from it because I was having problems with it so I thought it would be a good time try out some new browsers. I recommend it : )

The Anti-Apple rant of the day !! Tada ! Actually 10% share of the web traffic is not so ridiculous for a browser... I would say that Opera is barely used... I don't like it on Windoze because of its look but it's still the best browser on the Mac I think by how smooth and fast it is. Plus it's very expandable and customizable. "As someone with three Macs at home, I couldn't help but notice that Apple pushed Safari 4 out as an automatic update to all of its users this week" Of course they do, and I hope so. The browsers are still the gate for the malicious softs and phishing, so I'd rather have an updated one !!!!!! But at least if you don't like it you can disable for ever this update. Try that in the windows updater for IE8...

Paul never inflates, exaggerates, or engages in hyperbole. You can trust everything he writes, or reposts as the Gospel truth. This is proven by the fact that he has never printed a strikethrough, redaction or retraction, even when he has been presented with "evidence" and "facts" that handily contradict him. Obviously the "truth" is a lie. Rush Thurrott on the Winsupersite for FOX news.

wlow, if you actually talk to everyday people, I think you may be surprised at how few people care about acid3 compliance. Especially as it isn't actually standards based. Once the draft standards in it are set in stone, THEN we can worry about what does or doesn't pass the ACID3 test.

At least we all still have something to fret over.

Yep, Safari 4 is even fast on my old 1999 G4 Tower. Pretty impressive!

@grannyville "Haven't Apple been in trouble before with pushing Safari onto people's computers through the Apple Software Update?" Yes lots of crap about that one. Even though when I was building out a new Windows 2003/SQL2005 server for our test lab today, I used windows update to get all of the latest updates and in the list was IE8. Funny thing is I look at the URL bar and I see winsupersite???? I thought I was on the wrong site! Safari even on Windows blows the doors off of IE8. Just go to google maps, and drill down to your house (looking at the US map) with double clicks. IE8 draws so slow. Safari does it faster than I have even seen. Ok off to search for some Windows/Microsoft news.

So, does it come with free security software too?

Paul, any idea if these updates were pushed out to people with other Apple software (but not Safari) on their PC? I have had Safari pushed to me in the past even though I had only iTunes on the PC.

Sharkster, I have Quicktime on my XP PC and my $399 Vista laptop, but neither got the update/DL of Safari 4 [which is not installed on either]. I didn't even get a notification.

I'm not surprised that 6 million windows users opted to download the new Safari. After all, IE is absolutely dog slow at Javascript. And it gets 21/100 on Acid3. What an embarrassment. Why would anyone use such a SLOW and non-standards compliant browser?

"I have had Safari pushed to me in the past even though I had only iTunes on the PC." The initial release of Safari as a update was in a version of Apple update, but after the outrage Apple backed off. Even before they backed off there was a menu option in the update tool to not check for updates on stuff you had unchecked. A simple case of RTFM.

The point is that Safari is used by people that have the intelligence, and desire, to want something better. So people that use it, Chrome or Firefox, they are smarter. It's that simple. On the other hand, a drone will simply take what crap they are given, in this case Internet Exploder and Windows, and put up with it. Why? Because they don't know any better. So they eat the crap they are dished out. " That's another nice bit of obvious reporting that usually escapes the Apple-friendly media." Don't confuse this and other blogs with reporting. That it ain't.

cesjr "I'm not surprised that 6 million windows users opted to download the new Safari" Hmmm. Let's check the math... There are 35 million Mac users according to Apple's numbers at the WWDC. Now remember that this was auto updated and it's the bundled browser (and we know from Opera that the bundled browser is an unbeatable competitor that always wins). 5 million of the Mac users updated their bundled copy of Safari to v4. And 30 million of them either actively turned down the auto update or didn't even use Safari in the first three days. So, that's 5/35 or only 14% of all Mac users. Pretty bad acceptance for a free, pushed update to a bundled utility. 86% of all Mac users said "No thanks" to Safari 4. But, hey, you and Apple are both so proud that 5M Windows users downloaded it. Maybe that's where the good numbers are. Using the 1,000M number of Windows users (and that's a conservative number that's likely closer to 1,100M by now but we'll cut Apple some slack since the rounding we're doing is only about 3x their total installed base) we get 5/1,000 or 0.5%. So 99.5% of Windows users said, "huh? why bother?" Combining those two we get the BIG brag number. 11 million copies. Why that must be the number that will look good. Add the Mac and Windows users and throw in 9M Linux users just to be generous to them. That gives us 1,044M total PCs out there. 11/1,044. Why, that's an installed base of 1.05% . So looking at the numbers we get: Mac (pushed): 14% Windows: 0.5% All PCs: 1.05% Yep. After doing the math, I'm not surprised either that 99.5% of Windows users said "No, Thanks!" to Safari 4. What I am surprised about is that Apple's bragging about it and that you were so innumerate that you bought it.

@mikegalos: "As a former Program Manager on the OneCare 1.0 team, it's really great to see the people who love the product." Not many do: "The service [OneCare] was criticized for being unable to detect a significant number of threats, with one site ranking the service DEAD LAST among a comparison of 17 anti-virus services."

"New study shows iPhone users to be in a class by themselves iPhone users are richer, younger, and perhaps even more productive at work than those who use competing smartphones, according to a new study released Friday." Very true.

mikegalos@msn.com - Do you know any of the guys on the IE team? If so, please give them a call and ask them how it feels to make such a dog slow browser when it comes to javascript, just because MS doesn't like web standards

Oh, and on the subject of browsers, does anyone know why flash games run better in windows than they do in other OSs? For example, the TG motocross series, I realised some time ago, runs really nice under windows, but on the same machine in the same broswer (firefox), it runs dog slow on either Linux, Unix or OSX. Are these games optimised in any way for windows? I mean, it can't be the hardware, this was on the same laptop. I never did try it on Safari on the Windows or OSX partitions.

I actually *chose* to run IE8. I am perfectly capable of downloading and running any browser I choose. I make my living as a web developer, so it's my business to have as many browsers on my machines as I can lay my hands on. And yet I actively chose to run IE8. Why? Because as of this moment, it provides the best mix of speed and features. Once you acknowledge that most of Firefox's extensions are worthless, you're left with a browser (at least in 3.0--I've only briefly evaluated 3.5 beta) that hogs memory like it's going out of style, takes forever to start up and is crash-happy. As the hacker's browser, it NEEDS extensions to make it halfway useful, and the extensions slow it down and make it hog even more memory. Blegh. I use Firefox as my primary testing browser, but not for day-to-day browsing. Chrome and Safari on Windows are just crap. Sure they're fast, but it's like they warped back to 1998 to achieve those speed gains; they have none of the features I have come to depend on in a modern browser. Things like Delicious bookmark support, intelligent tab management, proper auto-fill, ad-blocking and lots of other things. Opera is... well I'll just say I could never get comfortable with Opera, and leave it at that. It does things a little TOO differently. So that left me with IE8. It's fast enough, compatible enough, highly stable and secure and supports all of the features I need from a browser. It doesn't excel at any one thing, but it does everything well enough, which makes it a perfect day-to-day browser. Unless, of course, you hate Microsoft, in which case it's the anti-christ. I mean, I used to be one of the biggest IE haters around, especially in the bad old days of IE6. But I am quite surprised at how comfortable I am using IE8 these days, and when I switch to other browsers (which I do regularly) I always find myself going back to IE8 after a few days. IE8 may not be the fastest, or the most hacker-friendly, or the most standards compliant. But (to me, at least) it just *feels* right. So it's my default. On my Mac, it's a similar situation with Safari (though I had to add Saft and DeliciousSafari to get the features I wanted.) I used to use Firefox and Flock, but the speed and stability of Safari combined with the features I needed from Saft and DeliciousSafari resulted in the perfect day-to-day browsing solution for me.