Apple's Mac OS X, Safari register share gains in September

[AppleInsider]

Apple's share of the worldwide computer installed based rose to over 6.6 percent last month, helped largely by growth of Intel-based systems, according to just-released data from market research firm Net Applications. At the same time, the company's Safari web browser also posted healthy share gains.

For the month of September, the percentage of Internet users running the Intel version of Apple's Mac OS X operating system grew more than 14.5 percent to 3.23 percent, up from 2.82 percent in August. Some of those users appear to have upgraded from systems running the PowerPC version of Mac OS X, which saw its share dip slight to 3.33 percent from 3.38 percent.

When combined, however, Intel- and PowerPC-based Mac systems accounted for more than 6.61 percent of the worldwide computer installed base in September, according to Net Applications. That represents a 40 percent surge from the same time a year ago, when both flavors of the Mac OS combined for just a 4.72 share. It also represents a 7.5 percent increase from August, when both versions combined for a 6.15 percent share.

Apple also continued to fair well in the Web browser department, with usage of its Safari browser rising some 43 percent over the course of the past year. According to Net Applications, Safari accounted for 5.07 percent of web traffic in September, up from just 3.53 percent during the same time last year.

Operating System Market Share for September, 2007

Usage of the Safari browser was also up more than 8 percent from August when it registered a 4.68 percent share. Overall, Safari posted the largest share gain of any other browser during September.

Browser Market Share for September, 2007

Net Applications says it uses a unique methodology for collecting its market share data. This includes collecting data from the browsers of site visitors to their exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers, which consists of more than 40,000 urls.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[Clive At Five]

The second image is identical to the first. I assume it is suppose to reflect browse-share?

-Clive

[TBaggins]

Firefox 3 is coming in a couple of months or so. Be nice if they could get above 20% share. IE 7 is a pretty big improvement over the craptastic IE 6, but even so, I still prefer the alternatives, and a browser monopoly is just bad for everyone... 'cept MS, of course.

And kudos to Safari for coming up to a 5% share. Once its out of the 'beta' woods, that share should improve further.

.

[jonessodarally]

The first paragraph was worded really weird.

"...helped largely by growth of Intel-based systems..."


....wouldn't it have been helped ENTIRELY by people buying intel systems?

[MacTel]

Originally Posted by TBaggins

Firefox 3 is coming in a couple of months or so. Be nice if they could get above 20% share. IE 7 is a pretty big improvement over the craptastic IE 6, but even so, I still prefer the alternatives, and a browser monopoly is just bad for everyone... 'cept MS, of course.

And kudos to Safari for coming up to a 5% share. Once its out of the 'beta' woods, that share should improve further.

.

I agree that once Safari is out of beta its numbers will climb higher. Once out of beta, Apple should give the option to download and install Safari along with iTunes. That would bring more awareness to the product on the Windows side. Google does this kind of gorilla marketing.

[Vulcan1]

It's a shame that Opera doesn't get more recognition, i've used it for several years on both Mac and Windows and i think it's an excellent browser.

[Sälli]

In addition to separating Intel and PPC-based Macs from each other, Net Applications also separate different Windows releases from each other. For making a Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux comparison, see this page. It also compares the Windows CE, Symbian and the iPhone, with the latter one scoring the highest share of web browsing just three months after its release.

[ThunkDifferent.com]

iS the macintel suppose to be represented by the OS86 users? It seems that there are as many as regular OS X users, I wonder how the hackintosh development community is doing with the new leopard builds.

Thunk Different.

[eAi]

Originally Posted by ThunkDifferent.com

iS the macintel suppose to be represented by the OS86 users? It seems that there are as many as regular OS X users, I wonder how the hackintosh development community is doing with the new leopard builds.

Thunk Different.

What? MacIntel clearly represents Mac Intel users... I.e. all new Mac computers in the last year and a half or so.

[Lafe]

I skewed the results. I have an iMac that doesn't connect to the internet (yet), and a crappy Dell running XP that does.

So please subtract 0.00001% from the XP pie-slice, and add it to MacIntel.

Sorry for the confusion.

[cnocbui]

So how come AI fails to mention the iPhone update crippling/bricking modded iPhones.

Isn't that newsworthy? Perhaps Apple own AI?

[Clive At Five]

Originally Posted by ThunkDifferent.com

iS the macintel suppose to be represented by the OS86 users? It seems that there are as many as regular OS X users, I wonder how the hackintosh development community is doing with the new leopard builds.

Thunk Different.

Any OSX86 user would most definitely report a "MacIntel" number since these web counters query the software, and all OSX86 boxes are running Intel builds of OS X. HOWEVER, their numbers are so small compared to Intel Mac users that they wouldn't make much of a dent in the scores.

-Clive

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by Vulcan1

It's a shame that Opera doesn't get more recognition, i've used it for several years on both Mac and Windows and i think it's an excellent browser.

It got recognition in the pie chart. I wonder if it's a problem with Opera defaulting to sending a user agent string that says it's IE. For all we know, Opera might be in more widespread use than these things would suggest. I checked for three domains that I handle, and the hits using Opera browser are between a fourth to a tenth of the Safari hits.

Originally Posted by cnocbui

So how come AI fails to mention the iPhone update crippling/bricking modded iPhones.

Isn't that newsworthy? Perhaps Apple own AI?

That's interesting now that you mention it. It's been discussed in the thread attached to the 1.1.1 news posting, but not mentioned in a story. That posting does reiterate Apple's warning though, so maybe that story & thread was considered to be enough.

[lfmorrison]

Originally Posted by cnocbui

So how come AI fails to mention the iPhone update crippling/bricking modded iPhones.

Isn't that newsworthy? Perhaps Apple own AI?

No; that's already been discussed in other stories/threads. See the 1.1.1 announcement story for example. This is totally unrelated.

Thankfully, not every news story covered by every Apple-related web site is obliged to dwell on that one issue to the exclusion of everything else.

[Cleverboy]

Originally Posted by lfmorrison

No; that's already been discussed in other stories/threads. See the 1.1.1 announcement story for example. This is totally unrelated. Thankfully, not every news story covered by every Apple-related web site is obliged to dwell on that one issue to the exclusion of everything else.

God, yes. Some of these people are getting out of hand. Cheers to REAL news!

~ CB

[melgross]

Originally Posted by jonessodarally

The first paragraph was worded really weird.

"...helped largely by growth of Intel-based systems..."


....wouldn't it have been helped ENTIRELY by people buying intel systems?

The growth was entirely due to purchase of Intel systems. The total is only partly due to them.

Give it a few more years. Apparently, half of all the systems out there are still PPC.

[cygnusrk727]

Getting a little off track for a minute, it was shocking to see just how low Vista was after all these months on the market. Now is Apple's best chance to steal market share.

[aegisdesign]

Originally Posted by Vulcan1

It's a shame that Opera doesn't get more recognition, i've used it for several years on both Mac and Windows and i think it's an excellent browser.

There's always one.

Seriously though, Opera has to be the ugliest piece of software I've ever used, especially the Mac version. I cringe every time I get an email saying a site I've done doesn't work on Opera (thankfully rare these days).

Originally Posted by JeffDM

I wonder if it's a problem with Opera defaulting to sending a user agent string that says it's IE.

It's reported it's user agent as Opera by default for a number of years now. Since around version 8 back in 2005.

Originally Posted by Sälli

It also compares the Windows CE, Symbian and the iPhone, with the latter one scoring the highest share of web browsing just three months after its release.

So 1 million US iPhone slackers have surpassed 100 million Symbian users. Well done guys.

Somehow I think Net Applications stats are broken.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by cygnusrk727

Getting a little off track for a minute, it was shocking to see just how low Vista was after all these months on the market. Now is Apple's best chance to steal market share.

I'm looking forward to seeing graphs of Vista use vs. Leopard use in a few months. Surely Vista will be ahead as it's pre-installed on most low-grade PC purchases, but I believe--as previously read--that >80% of Mac users will upgrade to the latest OS almost immediately.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by aegisdesign

So 1 million US iPhone slackers have surpassed 100 million Symbian users. Well done guys.

Somehow I think Net Applications stats are broken.

Perhaps not. the iPhone's full browser surely makes surfng much easier than previous other cell phones with internet browser-like capabilities. How many of those 100 Symbian users are doing heavy browsing on their cell phones? I, for one, use Safari a great deal, where I never used it on any other cell phone despite it having a browser.

PS: My only wish is that Apple included an option for keyboard typeable, complex passwords instead of a 4 digit PIN and then included Keychain.app which was synced from my Mac for websites.

[zunx]

Great! The day the Mac has 20% market share, Windows will be history three years later.

[extremeskater]

Originally Posted by TBaggins

Firefox 3 is coming in a couple of months or so. Be nice if they could get above 20% share. IE 7 is a pretty big improvement over the craptastic IE 6, but even so, I still prefer the alternatives, and a browser monopoly is just bad for everyone... 'cept MS, of course.

And kudos to Safari for coming up to a 5% share. Once its out of the 'beta' woods, that share should improve further.

.

I am hoping Safari is the biggest improvement I see down the line. While I like it for many reasons it still crashes far too often, uses too much memory and doesn't give memory back after streaming video in some cases and most of the time is my only to reboot.

At least for me its been the only real point of weakness in OS X.

[bikertwin]

Wow, I haven't seen dithered graphics like that on the web for, what, 5 years?

What did you use to create those pie charts, AI? MS Paint? An Apple IIc?

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by zunx

Great! The day the Mac has 20% market share, Windows will be history three years later.

What is your basis for that?

There are millions of PCs being sold to use as POS (Point of Sale, not the other one) machines. Hell, even Apple Stores still use WinCE devices for their portable POS devices.

I expect Apple is busy perfecting a 30-pin connector Credit Card scanner adapter that will sit against the bottom of the device and a special iPhone OS X version that will work as a POS system. At least I hope so.

[Zlyden]

I also agree, that this research may not be accurate with a lot of browsers prentending to be something they are not (i.e. "Internet Explorer") to simplify life on sites that use IE-style plug-in detection, etc.

At least I know a lot of guys who use Opera on their Winodws PCs as default browser, and 0.87% looks TOO small. They probably should insrease this number by something like 10% (and deduct the same 10% from IE share).

At least in Russia a lot of web designers make sites that works only in IE or browsers that tell them that they are IE.

I also wonder what are these "40,000 url" they used to estimate "worldwide share"? Google may serve as a kind of good reference, but there are a lot users that prefere national resources that works better for their native language...

...well, this is just another research, right? Like any other research it's based on some sort of data that might be entirely wrong kind of data.

[dontlookleft]

the number of explorer users is gross. that thing is a piece of garbage.

i thought the word was spread about using firefox, safari and anything other than explorer; i guess i was wrong =[.

[Dan Wells]

If you add up the two flavors of Macs, they come within about half a percentage point of Windoze Vista! This is not only good for the Mac, but VERY bad for M$, because it means that people are actively AVOIDING Vista (many more than 7% of all computers are PCs bought since Vista was available, so Vista should be well above 7% on preloads alone, even if nobody ever BOUGHT a copy). People must have been deliberately buying XP PCs (and Macs instead of PCs), even with Vista released. Let's hope that Leopard is great!


-Dan

[wayland.ind]

Originally Posted by cygnusrk727

Getting a little off track for a minute, it was shocking to see just how low Vista was after all these months on the market. Now is Apple's best chance to steal market share.

not only cheap but they have to be a little more worth paying for than the underpowered mini and the macbook.

[melgross]

Originally Posted by Zlyden

I also agree, that this research may not be accurate with a lot of browsers prentending to be something they are not (i.e. "Internet Explorer") to simplify life on sites that use IE-style plug-in detection, etc.

At least I know a lot of guys who use Opera on their Winodws PCs as default browser, and 0.87% looks TOO small. They probably should insrease this number by something like 10% (and deduct the same 10% from IE share).

At least in Russia a lot of web designers make sites that works only in IE or browsers that tell them that they are IE.

I also wonder what are these "40,000 url" they used to estimate "worldwide share"? Google may serve as a kind of good reference, but there are a lot users that prefere national resources that works better for their native language...

...well, this is just another research, right? Like any other research it's based on some sort of data that might be entirely wrong kind of data.

Moscow must be different from anywhere else. I don't know anyone here in NYC that uses it, though I'm sure some do.

The problem with Opera is that even if it can log as IE, it doesn't work like IE, and has many problems with sites that other browsers don't have.

I find it to be difficult to believe that web developers would even consider using it for that purpose.


Firefox, yes. Even Safari is more compatible.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by Dan Wells

If you add up the two flavors of Macs, they come within about half a percentage point of Windoze Vista! This is not only good for the Mac, but VERY bad for M$, because it means that people are actively AVOIDING Vista (many more than 7% of all computers are PCs bought since Vista was available, so Vista should be well above 7% on preloads alone, even if nobody ever BOUGHT a copy). People must have been deliberately buying XP PCs (and Macs instead of PCs), even with Vista released. Let's hope that Leopard is great!

You have to consider the graph represents installed base. What percentage of people have purchased a new PC in the last year? Those that did purchase and are using Vista frm previously using XP we have to consider what they did with their old system:simply turn it off, pass it along to someone else in need, of just trash it.

Originally Posted by wayland.ind

not only cheap but they have to be a little more worth paying for than the underpowered mini and the macbook.

Then you haven't priced out comparable notebooks by specs.

[melgross]

Originally Posted by dontlookleft

the number of explorer users is gross. that thing is a piece of garbage.

i thought the word was spread about using firefox, safari and anything other than explorer; i guess i was wrong =[.

No, it sounds about right.

Whatever you might think, most people use whatever browser is on their machine. It takes a concerted effort to bother downloading, and installing something else.

IE works well enough for most people, there is no reason for them to change that. At least, not from THEIR point of view.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by melgross

No, it sounds about right.

Whatever you might think, most people use whatever browser is on their machine. It takes a concerted effort to bother downloading, and installing something else.

IE works well enough for most people, there is no reason for them to change that. At least, not from THEIR point of view.

Right on.

My entire family save for my youngest sibling and me uses IE.

I have made the stipulation to friends and family that if you wish to get my assistance (any assistance) with your computer in the future then your next one has to be a Mac. I'm just so sick of dealing with all the issues that plague only Windows. Plus, with Leopard's iChat I will be able to take control or at least see what they are talking about when they say the "thingy" and "whatchamcallit" are "broke".

[ecking]

Opera needs more respect, it's a great browser.

Does safari marketshare count the mobile safari in the iphone and ipod touch?

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by ecking

Opera needs more respect, it's a great browser.

Does safari marketshare count the mobile safari in the iphone and ipod touch?

Good question. Anyone know how the browser info shows up on webpages?

[Zandros]

Did all the PPC Mac users go back to classic Mac OS?

/Adrian

[melgross]

Originally Posted by Zandros

Did all the PPC Mac users go back to classic Mac OS?

/Adrian

There are probably too few of them to register.

[TBaggins]

Do ya still have to pay for Opera?

I'd think that, or the impression that you do, is a major reason why Opera has such low share.

.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by TBaggins

Do ya still have to pay for Opera?

I'd think that, or the impression that you do, is a major reason why Opera has such low share.

It's been free for maybe a couple years now.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by melgross

There are probably too few of them to register.

Do you mean that for OS 9 or PPC?

I don't think that's the case for PPC, if you look at the chart, there's Mac OS and MacIntel, both given their own wedges that are similar in size, the only way that really makes sense is if Mac OS is PPC.

[aegisdesign]

Originally Posted by Dan Wells

If you add up the two flavors of Macs, they come within about half a percentage point of Windoze Vista! This is not only good for the Mac, but VERY bad for M$, because it means that people are actively AVOIDING Vista (many more than 7% of all computers are PCs bought since Vista was available, so Vista should be well above 7% on preloads alone, even if nobody ever BOUGHT a copy). People must have been deliberately buying XP PCs (and Macs instead of PCs), even with Vista released. Let's hope that Leopard is great!

Not really. All this shows is that Vista has had very little take up in businesses yet, who will conservatively stick with XP for as long as they can. Businesses are actively AVOIDING Vista, not people. That may change after Vista SP1 next year I guess.

Originally Posted by TBaggins

Do ya still have to pay for Opera?

I'd think that, or the impression that you do, is a major reason why Opera has such low share.

Not for the last few years, yet despite that, people don't use it and usage hasn't grown even with the user agent string now set to Opera instead of faking IE. It's only growth being in Mobile Opera and on things like the Wii. Mobile Opera's days must surely be numbered though as Nokia and others are shifting to Webkit based browsers.