OneStat.com, today reported that Apple’s Safari browser has shown a fast adoptation rate with a global usage share of 0.11 percent in the first weeks of its public launch. Opera 7 is not so successful as Apple’s Safari. Opera 7 has a global usage share of 0.03 percent in the first weeks (since December) of its public launch. Microsoft still dominates the browser market. As of February 03, 2003, all versions of Microsoft accounted for 95,2 percent of the global usage share market. The total global usage share of Netscape is 2.9 percent and the global usage share of Netscape 7 is 0.64 percent. Mozilla is at 1.2%.Our Take: Behold the power of a company with the drive. And think where that would drive Safari after it comes standard with OSX! This little rant is a continuation of what we were discussing two weeks ago and here a few days ago.
Apple’s Safari Browser Shows Promising Start According to OneStat
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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When is Apple going to give back to the OSS community by porting over some of their nice applications or give some info on interacting with their applications so OSS folks can create something of a equavalent at least ? I don’t understand how Apple a hardware company refuses to give back real help to the OSS community by porting over their nice Apple applications to Free/Net/Open/BSD or Linux. They take working stuff that is almost polished yet they don’t give back in terms of even porting over something like Quicktime so OSS community can use it and not resort to hacking Apple codecs.
Try visiting their site with K-Meleon. The onestat.com website is totally unusable with K-Meleon .6 Build 547. It’s the first site I’ve had a problem with. Looks like CSS problems to me.
Why would they want to port anything? Their apps are commercial and Linux users don’t buy. So, why would they want to port anything for that matter? Also, porting the iLife applications is almost impossible (yes, even with Gnustep), as they heavily rely on the OSX media subsystem and APIs. Much of a job with a big zero in return for them. They are a public company, they have to have profit.
As for the Konqueror stuff they used in Safari, they have ALREADY given back the diffs to KDE project. And Apple has already being open in stuff that ARE portable, like the Darwin, Rendesvouz stuff etc etc. But not their graphics stuff.
I’ve checked out Safari at the Newport Beach Apple store and it is fast. Much faster than IE. I like IE but when I finally buy a new powermac, I’m going to be using Safari as my main browser.
Now if Apple could just make the finder faster…
– Mark
Safari has become my main browser on OSX, simply because it is simple (as opposed to bloated interfaces that others have) and because it is the FASTEST of all. Not only on rendering, but also on scrolling and resizing. Safari still has a zillion bugs, I have submitted the bugs back to Apple. But even with all those bugs, it is the most usable of all under OSX.
Linux users do purchase comercial applications when they are aviable. No one is saying that they should not make a profit but you make it seems as if Linux user are all cheap. Hell have you even noticed the amount for warez aviable for Windows and Mac platform ? How many people are running around install Windows 2K, Office, etc.. and below because they can get away with it ?
Also there are other ways to give back without porting full apps. They could allow OSS developers to use and implament their codecs and other files that are used in certian applications so they can develop OSS versions of those applications themselves that can interact with their own Apple applications. As far a Darwin and that other crap is concerned it is not and will not go anywhere anytime soon.
What ? IE is not bloated How dare you say that IE is bloated.
Opera by default identifies as Internet Explorer, chances are high people keep it that way or move it to Mozilla. Many sites block Opera for god-knows-what-reason.
*I think* that starting from Opera 7.0, Opera identifies as Opera. At least my copy did, except if 7.0 used the settings of the already uninstalled 6.05. If that is so, the survey is pretty much on track.
I finally figured out why I like Safari so much. Before Apple released this fine piece of software, I had been using OmniWeb 4.1 and liking it a lot. Now, I can’t go back. It’s not that I don’t miss OmniWeb’s features though.
Y’see, Safari reminds me of a little browser myself and a fair number of other OSNews people used to browse with – Be’s own NetPositive. Sure, it wasn’t the world’s best web browser, but is was damn fast, and when it worked, it was a joy to use. Rather than fill the browser with complicated features, both Be and Apple chose to make a simple yet effective web surfing tool, recognizing that the added time spent as a result of the features isn’t justified by the length of time people spend actually viewing the average web page.
So, long live NetPositive, er, Safari, I say!
Why would anyone want to use anything other than IE? Some browsers might have minor advantages, but all in all IE does everything a typical user would expect from a browser, plus it is available for Windows, Mac and Solaris (and Linux users can run it through Solaris emulation). Plus most web sites are designed for IE, and the reason is simple, it has the best HTML rendering. Why should I bother reading the 100+ page W3C HTML spec just to cater to 1% of the market, when I can use FrontPage to design a world-class web site for IE?
Well, even if Opera identifies itself as IE by default I think that Opera has no right for complaining, since they built in the ability to identify as a different browser. I for exemple CHOOSE to identify as opera when I use Opera, since I think that is the only way that I can help convincing webmasters to use REAL standards and not the unofficial IE standard is by telling them what I use. But usually I use either mozilla or konq, since both of them are excellent browsers and getting better each and every day.
Opera 7.0 final identifies as IE 6.0 by default.
Many people running konw probably identifies themselves as either moz/ns or ie
Good point my friend ! Frontpage is becoming the defacto standard on the web and W3C standards be damned !
i use opera 7 b/c it is very fast, and i like the wand password manager. it renders pages very quickly.
Why I don’t use IE (even though I’m using it right now on my brother’s laptop)? I save a LOT of time with Opera. And a lot of migraines, crashes, etc.
IE may meet most people’s needs, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers don’t have some important advantages. The one features I can’t live without when web browsing is session management. It doesn’t matter how fast it is if I can’t save the web browsing session when I close the browser. That’s the main reason I use Opera, it saves me more time than all the other nice features put together. The only other browser I know of that can save the window setup is Galeon and that’s not available for Windows.
I have Opera set up to identify itself as IE6, as there are sites that don’t work if it’s identified as Opera. Since that’s the default and most people don’t bother changing it, the Opera figures seem rather meaningless.
I agree. Personally, I use Phoenix 0.5 in Linux and Mozilla 1.3 in Windows, and I’m glad to see Safari gain so many users. Hopefully, when web developpers see the growing number of non-Microsoft browsers in their server logs, like you said, it’ll convince them to code to WC3 spec.
I’m getting sick of visiting sites that are designed for IE only.
Let’s see how the Safari share looks in six months. It’s off to a good start, showing that the OS X folks (who have no excellent browser) are migrating to Safari en masse.
As I’ve used OS X more, the most glaring problem is not the lack of browsers. It is the appallingly poor quality of the screen display. No matter what anti-alias setting, most of the common fonts look horrible compared to ClearType on Windows XP. Apple should license this technology as Windows XP is easily twice as clear as OS X (on an LCD monitor).
It will be interesting to see if Apple honors the GPL and makes their changes to Konqueror (and whatever else they lifted from Linux) available.
–ms
1. The need for Safari in the Mac OS X environment is obviously stronger than the need for Opera 7 in the Windows world. (I hear Safari offers better performance when compared to other browsers for the platform.)
2. Opera 7, as well as various others previous versions, identifies itself by default as IE, given that many sites force the requirement of IE for proper function, where such requirement is not really necessary. Does onestat check for that?
3. Regardless of anything, Opera 7 is cool and I’m using it as my default browser. In fact, this post has been generated with Opera 7. If others don’t want to use it, oh well, their problem.
1. The need for Safari in the Mac OS X environment is obviously stronger than the need for Opera 7 in the Windows world. (I hear Safari offers better performance when compared to other browsers for the platform.)
2. Opera 7, as well as various others previous versions, identifies itself by default as IE, given that many sites force the requirement of IE for proper function, where such requirement is not really necessary. Does onestat check for that?
3. Regardless of anything, Opera 7 is cool and I’m using it as my default browser. In fact, this post has been generated with Opera 7. If others don’t want to use it, oh well, their problem.
You really shouldn’t make any of claim, so here’s proof.. -> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104196912316326&w=2
Mouse gestures!!!!
I wish every browser had them.
Everytime I get on a machine with IE
I catch myself still doing mouse gestures.
I’m hooked.
19 vulnerabilities even after using the latest version and latest patches
http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/
Worst CSS2 compatibility of all modern browsers
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/intro.html
Only average and slow DOM (aka “JavaScript”) compatibility
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/version5.html
It’s using a stupid hack for speed up which can actually slow down
http://www.grotto11.com/blog/?+1039831658
Etc.
The prior poster’s comparison between Safari and NetPositive is valid. Safari does remind me of using Net+ back when BeOS was around; its fast, and does the job without a lot of useless feature bloat. (Are you listening, Netscape?)
I was using Netscape 7 on my iMac as my default browser. I deleted IE because it is so bad. I have since switched to Safari. Although it is far from feature complete, its speed makes it the compelling choice. Also, I like the clean interface, clearly designed by Apple to complement their OS. I look forward to watching Safari mature into a truly great browser.
“Free/Net/Open/BSD or Linux. They take working stuff that is almost polished yet they don’t give back in terms of even porting over something like Quicktime so OSS community can use it and not resort to hacking Apple codecs.”
If I recall the Quicktime Streaming Server is open sourced and can be run under other architectures… like FreeBSD
As for hacking Apple codecs… either those are also included with the streaming server or you don’t need them for a server. Last I checked BSD’s main focus was as a server OS – so you wouldn’t need the client codecs. Linux is not part of the OSS crowd linux is the “linux source crowd” and they are the only ones I know of in your list who are pushing for the desktop. (Also the ones Apple has specifically NOT used code from.)
If you mean KHTML then yes they have already given back and are following the GPL… a lot more openly than Lindows is btw.
But stop mixing the term linux with linux applications. Its bad enough people use linux to mean the entire OS. (Which is what I thought you were refering to originally when you said using code from linux.) It doesn’t need to also mean every program written for linux. Thats the equivalent of labeling Photoshop as “Windows”, or saying QuarkXpress is “Mac OS”, or even calling Apache2.0 for Win32 “Windows”
If you dont’ think there is a HUGE Linux warez scene, I invite you to check out alt.binaries.linux.warez in your newsgroups application.
The media does not hear of the mass pirating of commercial software for linux because there isn’t nearly the same amount of commercial software compared to Windows. When and if Photoshop, 3dsMax, a lot more games and other high demand applications are available for linux, you will see more pirating.
Most people piss and moan when a distributor actually charges for their software, like SuSE. How do you think they are going to pay for something like Photoshop or 3dsMax? Or any other high demand application?
You can get SuSE for free via ftp install ! So that is not a issue.
alt.binaries.linux.warez anywhere ? I tried google and did not find it. Also my ISP provider does not seem to carry it as well. Does this newgroup even exsist ?
“When is Apple going to give back to the OSS community by porting over some of their nice applications or give some info on interacting with their applications so OSS folks can create something of a equavalent at least ? I don’t understand how Apple a hardware company refuses to give back real help to the OSS community by porting over their nice Apple applications to Free/Net/Open/BSD or Linux.”
Apple needs these quality apps to make purchasing their expensive hardware worth it. If they ported them to other OSes poeple would give pause to paying for the Mac hardware. Apple may not make a dime off their OS but they do need the iLife apps to convince people to buy their hardware.
You don’t get it do you. Apple is doing just as the opensource movment is setup to do. They use an open product. But there is nothing causing them to give back. If they used something GPL they would give back to the project as required. But thats also why you don’t see many companies building of GPL’d code. If a company is going to use opensource code there going to use what has the least strings attached. If you choice to Open source you app your saying your fine with what Apple does, cause thats what will happen. If you don’t want them to take something and run with it GPL it. Then they probably will not take any of it, they will go for something else. Don’t complain about someone using the system just as it is setup to do.
Far as codecs and porting apps, their is zero reason for them to do that. It lessons their products value. They want you to buy a mac. If you could have everything mac without a mac they would have no business model. And at any rate there is no market outside of mac and windows. And trying to sell a product to a group that is all about free isn’t going to work.
On a differant note, I to found Net+ the best browser ever. To bad it just got to dated and found the net unfriendly. Well for now there is Phoenix, it’s ok, and some ways better. But it’s no net+
I wonder what the chance are of Apple ever creating a Windows version of Safari? Yes, I know it doesn’t create a revenue stream for them, and it does reduce the exclusivity of their platform somewhat.
OTOH, it would propogate the use of the KHTML technology, further encouraging web designers to take it into account when designing their sites. Also, it would make a great advertisement for Apple’s technology. Might be worth their while to consider.
>>>19 vulnerabilities even after using the latest version and latest patches.
The majority of the information on that webpage is old. The majority of the vulnerabilities simply list them as IE5, IE5.5 or IE6. Less than a handful of vulnerabilities SPECIFICALLY list IE 6 SP1 as vulnerable.
So you have to guess whether IE6 SP1 is not vulnerable at all to the majority of the vulnerabilities in the first place; OR that the vulnerabilities were patched in IE6 SP1 and Pivx forgot to mention it on their webpage; OR that the vulnerabilities are present in IE6 SP1 and Pivx forgot to mention it on their webpage; OR that the vulnerabilities had NEVER been tested/verified to be present at all in IE6 SP1.
>>>OTOH, it would propogate the use of the KHTML technology, further encouraging web designers to take it into account when designing their sites.
This line of reasoning (particularly by mozilla supportors who dream that if AOL adopts gecko in the AOL browser then the tide would start to change) — totally falls flat.
The fact is that AOL users represent something like 10% of the world’s total internet users. Even if they all switched to gecko — that’s only around 15% totall for aol/netscape/mozilla.
The fact is that netscape had 15% of the browser market 18 months ago and websites were written for IE only. The fact is that netscape had 20% of the market 24 months ago and websites were written for IE only. The fact is that netscape had 30%…. and … written for IE only.
“The onestat.com website is totally unusable with K-Meleon .6 Build 547.”
k-meleon is at release .7 now.
give it a try.
I used to use IE until somebody turned me on to Phoenix a couple of months ago, and I have been using it ever since.
Not only does it have tabbed browsing and a built-in pop-up killer, but I don’t have to worry about security nearly as much as I used to.
As for the Linux warez scene, not only is there alt.binaries.warez.linux, but there is also anohter group too (alt.binaries.cd.image.linux … I think, too lazy to look it up). Between those two newsgroups, I’ve seen readily available Crossover Office 1.3, StarOffice 6, Kylix 3, Xandrose, RH8 Advanced Server, WineX, VMWare and god only knows what else.
Though I wouldn’t go as far as to say Linux users never buy anything (though some zealots seem to be obsessed about what comes with the OS), I think the notion that only Windows users are pirating stuff is a load of shit.
if tabbed browsing is so great – why is it only available in browsers. Perhaps apple should release a general tabbed API and make it available to other apps… such as word processors… email..photoshop..etc..
Yes it does.
In fact looking at it right now with road runner.
Let’s look what’s avialable right now:
Win4lin, turboprint, redhat adavanced server
on alt.binaries.cd.image.linux
Xandros Desktop 1.0, requests for OSX 10.2, RHAdvanced Server, even the training manuals for RHCE.
It’s all there, black and white, clear as crystal. Linux users DO pirate software. People will complain because Xandros doesn’t give away a full version of their software for free and will instead steal it.
People do this, even linux users, get over it.
Safari is going to be a great browser. Even though it’s full of bugs, I can’t stay away from it. I hope Apple pretty much just works on the bugs and leaves the rest alone. I don’t particularly like tabbed browsing, but realize many love it. If it doesn’t slow things down, Apple should go for it.
Apple kept it a secret too – amazing. I mean that it was khtml. Everyone was expecting Chimera. What a total fake-out!
Given that Apple platforms are a known quantity, I find the release of the apparantly bug ridden Safari a little puzzling. It’s not as if the release couldn’t have been delayed by a few months. What’s also puzzling is the absense of Opera 7.0 on the OS/X platform. Porting the core code and an OS/X specific GUI layer doesn’t strike me as the hardest task on the planet, and could’ve been leveraged in possible future products.
Are there any Safari screen shots I can see please?? I keep reading about it but no one seems to post screen shots! Is this a top secret thing?
Go to Apple’s site to see what Safari is about
http://www.apple.com/safari/
Thanks Sandman for the link. I think I am getting an Apple next time
may be 
opera inc. squandered a lot of its resources porting its wonderful browser to be os, os/2, qnx, mac os, etc.
it’s good to see it give up mac os development, that it may devote its remaining resources to win (perhaps linux).
opera is one of the very few applications that has be os type speed on windoze. gobe being another
I used Gobe Productive 2.0 on BeOS R5 and 3.0 on Windows XP. I notice huge amounts of speed differences, especially when it is concern with UI responsiveness.
SP1 for IE6 is not the most recent state – there is an additional cummulative security update fixing all vulnarabilities up until 22nd Nov 02 – this update is also alvailable for the other IE revisions. I do follow up IE security closely and there isn’t any major flaw that was made public since then. I usally grab them instantly as they appear on one news site or another…
Is you want to hinder data mining via cookies with IE6, check out this site:
http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/ie6_privacy_en.html
As most people using minority browsers are obliged to spoof as IE or at least Netscape to get into many sites, these statistics are worthless.
Presumably the Safari users that get counted are the ones who have not yet set it up to spoof as IE.
Keep in mind a little word, “spoofing” when reading stats…
opera inc. squandered a lot of its resources porting its wonderful browser to be os, os/2, qnx, mac os, etc. it’s good to see it give up mac os development, that it may devote its remaining resources to win (perhaps linux).
Th value of the Opera brand is in its speed, standards compliance, and cross-platform availability. Not producing an OS/X version undermines that. They’ve also completely ignored the potential of web authoring tools. This I fear, is a sign of a significant management weakness. Still, their product is appealing to mobile telephone manufacturers…
Because IE has security problems (not bugs) that other browsers do not have. ActiveX is one of them. Also IE’s handeling of filetypes/mimetype have caused several security problems. Others browsers do not have these which is why they are more secure.
Also IE runs slow on my 1GHz and it isn’t compatible with all the pages that I visit.
Why was Jim’s post moderated down:
There is a tag at the end of the Opera user agent that identifies it as opera 6. Although you do not know this, most companies that collect browser statistics for a profession do.
Its true, Opera appends an identifier to the end of the user agent string sent during a HTTP query. In fact, it is possible to customise the one sent by IE using group policy in Windows 2K/XP. As I use Opera as my main browser, I’ve configure my IE to append “Opera 7” to the end of its user agent string ;o)
Why would they want to port anything? Their apps are commercial and Linux users don’t buy. So, why would they want to port anything for that matter? Also, porting the iLife applications is almost impossible (yes, even with Gnustep), as they heavily rely on the OSX media subsystem and APIs. Much of a job with a big zero in return for them. They are a public company, they have to have profit.
Well… Apple could gain some market share in streaming if they just create a version of their Quicktime player for OSS (sigh… even in closed source form) like Real do these days. It could prevent people to turn to their competitors. They also could make some profit on this by promoting their streaming server thing running in OSX Server and have a truely multi-platform solution.
If they already give this stuff for free in Windows and MacOS, why not produce a Linux/*BSD version?
Best Regards,
DeadFish Man
1. They release the source they have modified, it’s not up to Apple to “give” that back, if they released the relevant source.
2. The modifications to the parts take from KDE/Konqueror are beeing incorporated, expect most of them to be there by KDE 3.2
Apple’s Safari browser […] 0.11%, Opera 7 […] 0.03%, all versions of Microsoft accounted for 95,2 percent, Netscape is 2.9 percent, Netscape 7 is 0.64 percent.
I didn’t know Microsoft was a web browser. I dunno if that was intentional or not to mix up OSes and web browsers, but it just sounds to me (unwilling) propaganda.
I rewrote entirely a website to be 100% XHTML & CSS standard compliant, so accessible to all browsers, and IE market share is around 84%, about 12ish percent for Netscape & Mozilla together, and the rest is shared among many browsers (opera, lynx, search engines…). As for OSes, Windows comes first with around 88%, then Mac with 6%, all form of Unix 3%, search engines for the rest.
The site is not related to computing at all, it’s a caribbean literature publisher website. You can guess visitors are not geeks or hi-tech freaks.
Sure if people create non-standard websites that only IE can render, it’s not surprising those sites are heavily visited by the supported browser.
http://www.zdnet.nl/poll.cfm
IE: 74%
Mozilla: 7%
Opera: 11%
Netscape: 3%
Konquerer: 1%
Safari: 4%
Nice to see that IE isn’t 95% anymore.
Hope things do change for more W3C-standard and choices.
Running IE on Linux via Solaris emulation would be just brilliant. What a waste of time. Linux already has Mozilla (and Phoenix, Galeon, etc.), Netscape 4, Konqueror, Opera. Why would anyone waste time with IE *for Solaris*?
“Why would anyone want to use anything other than IE? Some browsers might have minor advantages, but all in all IE does everything a typical user would expect from a browser, plus it is available for Windows, Mac and Solaris (and Linux users can run it through Solaris emulation). Plus most web sites are designed for IE, and the reason is simple, it has the best HTML rendering. Why should I bother reading the 100+ page W3C HTML spec just to cater to 1% of the market, when I can use FrontPage to design a world-class web site for IE?”
Dear anonymous, if anyone didn’t tell you before, I will enjoy being the first. You are a complete idiot.
The most fundamental reasons: 1. Its slow. 2. It doesn’t offer tabbed browsing etc. 3. It is bloated. Full of MS specific code. 4. Web pages are becoming IE independent in the end. Thanks to spreading Linux and Mac boxes. 5. It is from MS, the most unethical company that you can spot. Thats why IE pages are not standards compliant.
You can also check out this list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot:
http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/arts/reasons.html
Look at the statistics and tell all those users who are still using versions pre IE6 SP1. According to OneStat they amount to at least 34% of all used browsers, all those people using IE6 instead IE6 SP1 not even included.
So the potential security risk here is huge and shouldn’t be underestimate, even in case your IE6 SP1 miracle is indeed fixing those 19 vulnerabilities without introducing new ones in the last one month (which I highly doubt).
…Why should I bother reading the 100+ page W3C HTML spec just to cater to 1% of the market, when I can use FrontPage to design a world-class web site for IE?
FrontPage?? World-class?!?!?! Oh, please… 😀
At my university we have a website for automatic homework creation and grading (http://webassign.ncsu.edu/). For some bizarre reason, Internet Explorer does not work with it *at* *all* (won’t download lessons in PDF format for example); students are told from the outset to use Netscape Navigator 4.x. I think it has to do with issues in Javascript.
Oddly enough, the current version of Phoenix on Linux does *not* work with some aspects (e.g. I couldn’t set question weights last week), while Opera 6 on Linux *does*.
So, here’s one very good reason not to use IE: you’ll fail some classes here if you don’t. 🙂
>>>So the potential security risk here is huge and shouldn’t be underestimate
I am not underestimating the security risk here, I am just pointing out that pivx is using that webpage as an advertisement for their security service and advertisements can be somewhat misleading.
What can Microsoft do? I don’t blame them for patching their latest products first and then patch older software later. Also the same people still using IE4 or IE 5 — chances are that even if Microsoft provides patches for those 19 vulnerabilities —- they are not going to apply them anyway.
>if tabbed browsing is so great – why is it only available in >browsers. Perhaps apple should release a general tabbed API >and make it available to other apps… such as word >processors… email..photoshop..etc..
Gnome has a general tabbed API – the gedit editor, the dzt terminal and the ghemical quantum mechanical molecular modeling progam are all gnome apps. that I use the tabbed mode in regularily.
ok heres something that has been bugging me for a few days – Apple release a browser, thats a beta, and is a little buggy (not that i can say for sure – im too poor to be able to afford one of those sweet 17″ powerbooks
).
When microsoft release an early version of their apps, they call it a 1.0 release or whatever, leaving everyone to believe that its a final version.
STrikes me as odd how the two companies refer to early version of their software – just comapre the first version of IE with that of Safari
Apple release it and say here you go , we know its buggy, but have a play & tell us what you think, wheras MSFT’s line would be ‘IE 1.0 ‘s amazing (but were not gonna tell you that its only a beta, until we get onto the pre-release stage, then we’ll call that 2.0, and finally when it gets to be ok (well as ok as IE can get
we’ll give you a stable version
What am i trying to say? i dunno- i need more sleep & am rambling, but i hope it leaves someone with at least something to think about…….