Well for one day,  according to TG Daily reporting satistics provided by Net Applications Safari is listed with a 10.91% share of the browser market on 28 February 2009.  This seems to be due to rapid uptake of the new beta version of Safari which is estimated to have been downloaded 11 million times over four days.

It is important to be careful when reviewing this type of browser statistics as there is generally some sampling bias as figures are collected from sites using their products.  However, it does highlight the importance of Safari.

Net Applications figures for the month put Safari’s market share at 7% overall which is a significant number of people even discounting the latest boost from the beta.  However, it should be noted that their figures place the market share of the mac operating system at nearly 10%.  This suggests that mac users may be more likely than microsoft users to switch from the browser packaged with the operating system to firefox or another browser.

Analysis: Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share

Browser Market Share

Download day 2008

It has only been a year and a half since the release of firefox 2 and with Internet Explorer 8 also in development it seems the current level of competition is helping drive the development of improved, standard compliant products.