Safari 4 Tops 11M Downloads, 6M On Windows.
8:29 am, June 12th, 2009, Leander Kahney
Safari 4 has several unique features, like full history search with Cover Flow images of sites visited. Image: Apple.
Safari 4 has been downloaded 11 million times is the first three days of release, Apple said in a press release on Friday — and 6 million of those were on Windows. There’s more Windows users running Apple’s browser than Mac users.
Eleven million downloads in three days is quite impressive, but not a record. In June last year, Mozilla set a Guinness World Record with 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in one day — the most downloaded software in 24 hours.
Apple claims Safari 4 is the fastest, most innovative browser available (It executes JavaScript nearly 8x faster than IE 8 and loads HTML web pages more than 3x faster than IE 8, Apple claims).
The browser will get better with the release of Snow Leopard in September. Says Apple:
“In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent. Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page. Safari running on Snow Leopard also delivers HTTP streaming, making it easy to deliver high-quality audio and video in industry standard formats from any web server without the need for browser plug-ins.”
Safari 4 was officially launched on Monday at WWDC, but had been widely available for months as a beta.
Posted by Leander Kahney in Apple, News, Software | Comment on this article
Once again, more than 1/2 the downloads are for Windows.
midas360, on June 13th, 2009 at 4:17 am
Partly the reason why there are so many downloads is that Apple said the browser is being “downloaded” not used. Apple Software Update hapily promotes Safari 4 under one of the optional downloads. “Happy-go-clicky” people or those that must have everything would download Safari 4, later to find out that they have a new weird icon on their desktop they have never heard of. Knowing the irritable and laggy nature of ASU on Windows, I’m not surprised at the number of downloads.
I’m not convinced Apple, stop giving people fake joy.
Ronald, on June 14th, 2009 at 12:59 am
in reality safari has not been downloaded 11million times. itunes has and because they trick you into piggyback download safari well the numbers are…
iHater, on June 14th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
well i’m a mac user and i happen to have downloaded the windows version under boot camp also, so that my be the case for many downloads. mac users are downloading it twice for both systems and a lot more if they have more than one computer.
mec, on June 30th, 2009 at 4:39 pm