Safari Usage up 46% Annually


The growth is misleading, but for what it's worth Safari usage grew 46% in August, according to NetApplications.

Measured from September 2005 through August 2006, the Safari browser increased its share from 2.2% to 3.21%. Over the same period, Apple's portables and overall US and worldwide market share has risen appreciably.

This makes Safari the third most-used browser, behind MS IE (83.02%) and Firefox (11.84%). Netscape is fourth on 0.87%, while Opera is at 0.64%.

Safari, of course, is available on one platform only: OS X. A fair number of Mac users would also use Firefox exclusively or as a secondary browser. It has experienced phenomenal growth, which will only expand with further development.

IE's dominance, of course, has some major negatives: most pages are developed to comply with its 'standards' and government agencies and other organizations frequently develop tax return sites or other form-based pages which work correctly with IE only(usually version 6 or later). Sometime sites don't work with Mac at all, particularly those which demand a recent version of IE, which was killed in its Mac iteration shortly after Apple introduced Safari.