14 DAY TRIAL // With the release of Safari 3.0 for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP, Apple got a taste of vulnerabilities and of user disinterest in contrast to rival solutions. No less than eight security flaws hit Safari 3.0 on Windows in just the first day of availability of the public beta, indicating the true measure of Apple's secure from day one browser. Just days after launch, Apple hurried to patch there critical vulnerabilities in Safari 3.0 on Windows and safeguard users from remote code execution in the eventuality of a successful exploit.
The bad publicity that managed to build up around Apple's public beta browser did little good to boost the Cupertino-based company's marketing mechanism. As a matter of fact, it did just the contrary, and users are not crowding to download and deploy Safari 2.0 in the same manner as they jumped at the chance of downloading Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0. Now don't get me wrong, Apple has applauded the fact that Safari 3.0 topped 1 million downloads in the first two days. And I am sure that the Cupertino-based company has never seen such numbers. But they simply do not compare with the market performances delivered by direct rivals IE7 and Firefox 2.0.
"Apple today announced that more than 1 million copies of Safari for Windows were downloaded in the first 48 hours since the free public beta was made available on Monday. Safari 3 is the world's fastest and easiest-to-use browser, and is available as a free download," Apple revealed in a press release.
Compare this to the three million downloads in four days for Internet Explorer 7. In this context, IE7 enjoyed on launch far more success than Safari 3.0 did. But the fact of the matter is that both IE7 and Safari 3.0 have been outperformed by the adoption rate of Firefox 2.0. Mozilla's open source browser accounted for 2 million downloads in just the first day of availability. Now Safari 3.0 - or Safari Beta 3.0.1 for Windows after the updates - may have received the biggest market share boost in Apple history, but it just doesn't compare to IE7 and Firefox 2.0.