It's a Jungle Out There

Safari is certainly helping keep the browser wars hotter than ever. If you haven't already heard, Apple is bringing Safari to the Windows platform, and a beta version is already available.

This is going to make things very interesting. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I heard developers and business owners alike say that they don't worry too much about how their site works or looks on the Mac.

Their rationale? They claim their site has known issues with Safari, but given its relatively small market share, they have higher priority tasks to focus on. That's bananas if you ask me, and all about to change.

Although Firefox climbed to over 400 million users in just a few short years (which was an amazing feat all in itself), Apple is positioned to climb higher, faster. How? Well take those ear phones out for a second and I'll tell you in one word - iTunes.

Did you know that there are already over 500 million installations of iTunes, and that over 1 million more copies of iTunes are downloaded each and every day? How about a web browser to go with that download? Sure, if its a good browser, why not.

And indeed it is. Safari for Windows looks great and works well too. And in fact, just recently a study found that Safari is easily outperforming both IE and Firefox in terms of its raw speed in loading and rendering pages. Not too shabby.

Firefox grew in popularity due to its improvements over IE and became quickly well known among the tech savvy. To this date if you find someone with Firefox on their machine, you can pretty much bet they are either tech savvy or someone in their household is.

This means that Firefox needs to bank primarily on tech savvy individuals to spread the love, and has no free ride onto a user's machine. Safari on the other hand could be spread at the rate of 1 million+ copies a day, every single day, without even trying. Of course, not all users will opt to use the new browser, but nonetheless the exposure is unprecedented for a vendor other than Microsoft.

And, there are already 500 million installations of iTunes that can give Safari on Windows a huge boost at launch. As a quick comparison, Firefox downloads are at about 430 million total and seem to average about 500,000 downloads a day.

Whether Safari can overcome Firefox in the #2 position remains to be seen. But based on the math alone it seems possible this could happen, if Safari can indeed deliver the goods.

However this plays out, one thing's for sure - the days of ignoring Safari users and treating their market share as insignificant will soon be history.

We've been recommending for a while now that developers embrace Safari (both for Mac and Windows) and ensure all the bugs and kinks are ironed out. No more monkey business - it won't be long now before Safari users on Windows come swinging wildly in to a site near you.