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.
