Safari's slice of browser market up

met: Safari on a Mac is an application, just like any other. It is not "built-in" to the OS per s鬠but rather bundled with it as a convenience. IE, on the other hand, is built-in to Windows. You can not remove it. The "explorer" built in to Windows that is used to browse files is IE and it cannot be removed. This is how Microsoft got around their obligations in court to enable users to uninstall IE so that they would not have a browser monopoly.

Dinesh, care to explain how PC users are thrust with IE any more than Mac users are thrust with Safari ???

IE should be outlawed... I guess I'm still clinging to the past with that one...

An even more interesting graph is the one label "O/S Trend": http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5 According to their statistics, this month showed the largest rise in Mac OS users in the last year (and much longer, I would assume), with a .24% rise. Let's see how many people get Apple computers for Christmas...

IE is going to hold a commanding lead if you count corporate desktops ... since 99.9% of employees cannot randomly load software - if there was a survey that counted just home users or perhaps just weekend use in the US (otherwise, there would be spillage from int'l sites) ... that would be a much more accurate measuremenbt of REAL users - otherwise by that measure, cubicles are the most popular form of furniture ...

Keep in mind that 30% of mac visitors to bbc.co.uk are using internet explorer! The Mac market share must be above 4% now.

PC users are thrusted upon with IE, If they are not technical enought, they will simply use IE. I did the messenger job of Spreading the word about Firefox to my relatives and downloaded and installed it for them. They seem to like it better, but the fact is Just like they have no choice but a PC and Windows, they seem to think they have no choice on a browser too. Its all about awareness, I think another 2 or 3 years Firefox should gain considerably.

It's nice to have a positive slant in your article, but the use of "slightly" in the sentence "Safari is the third most popular browser, slightly behind Firefox, which holds 8.84% of the market" is a bit of a stretch and reminds me of a certain reality distortion field. The 2.78% browser market share of Safari is less than 1/3 that of Firefox. To me, that's not "slightly behind."

It amazes me that people still hold that Apple only has 3% of the computer market when their Mac-only browser, Safari, alone has nearly three percent of the browser market share. That would mean that nearly every Mac sold was on the internet using Safari only for it's browsing needs! I think that during the next national census, the government should include what type computers people are using as one of the questions on the survey! That would help clear up any misconceptions about actual market share of the Mac platform.

I think you mean "This is an increase of 1.22 percentage points since last year," an increase of 1.22% would be pretty disappointing. If you don't know the difference between the two phrases, I'm sure you can google around and figure it out.