Safari Gains Ground in Browser Wars

Apple's (AAPL) Safari made the biggest gains in September among mainstream Web browsers, according to new research released today by Net Applications Inc.

Although Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer still dominates the category, Safari's market share rose nearly 7.7% for the month and now represents better than 5% of the traffic on the Internet. Firefox's share rose slightly (2.15%) and now carries nearly 15% of the traffic. Explorer continued its slow fall, drifting down more than 1% for the month.

Net Applications samples browser data from visitors to a network of some 40,000 websites around the world, a method that tends to skew results toward computers that are heavily used and away from those that are gathering dust.

The most impressive growth in the latest numbers was the nearly 17% jump in "other," a category that includes such browsers as Opera, Netscape, Opera Mini, Mozilla, Danger Web Browser, Konqueror and PlayStation Portable Internet Browser.

The following table, derived from Net Applications' research, summarizes their results. For more detail, you can go to their website here. For a report on their operating system numbers, see Mac Installed Base Hits 6.6% in September.

Comments

[tom gaughan]

It's all Good for Apple

[ScottNY]

Is the iPhone browser counted as Safari or is it counted as Other? I only ask because the OS market share story mentions Mac OS X PPC, Mac OS X Intel and iPhone as three separate items, even though iPhone technically runs OS X.

ex ped: They break out 9 different versions of Safari. I can't tell which one represents the iPhone. Maybe you can. Here's the link:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6

--Philip Elmer-DeWitt

[Tom B]

IE has enormous staying power for an app that hasn't had a MEANINGFUL update this century. That's the power of 1) armies of corporate IT Neanderthals who still miss Win3.x 2) users who get nervous about installing non-MSFT software.

I mean, even if you don't like Safari, most versions of Firefox are solid and render the www more accurately than IE.