As Apple continues to fight for more market share it will continue to put pressure on all facets of the computer industry. Today Apple has announced that Safari 4, the newest update to their web browser, was downloaded 11 million times in three days. The 11 million mark breaks down to 6 million downloads for Windows and 5 million downloads for the OS X platform. Apple claims that its browser is the "world"s fastest, most innovative browser and is built on the world"s most advanced browser technologies".
The news only gets better for Apple with word that Microsoft will not be shipping Internet Explorer with Windows 7 in Europe. This will allow Apple to possibly expand its user base since there will be no default browser for European Windows 7 users and it will be up to OEMs to choose ones to preinstall, or for the user to decide their browser of choice.
While moving 11 million copies of any software is always an incredible feat its retaining users that is always the challenge. Many may have downloaded the updated browser to only test the waters. Will Safari 4 be able to take a bigger bite out of the IE market share? We may not know for some time.
Apple claims that its newest browser is "nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3" but mysteriously leaves out any mention of Google Chrome.
Both Safari and Chrome are based on the same WebKit rendering technologies, although they feature different javascript engines.