Tech & Biz

Safari 4 Downloaded Over 11 Million Times in 3 Days

by Jordan Yerman | June 12, 2009 at 01:55 pm

310 views | 37 Recommendations | 9 comments

Since its official release on Wednesday, Apple's Safari 4 Browser has been downloaded over 11 million times. 6 million of these downloads came from windows users. It's unclear, though, how many of these were active Safari surfers, or how many just downloaded it along with the latest iTunes update. My own test PC is in the middle of crashing, so I can't tell you for certain at the moment what the browser performance is like in that environment..

Aside from speedier performance, the new version of Safari features a more iTunes-like appearance, whcih some will like and some will loathe. It's a free download for Mac OSX (Tiger and Leopard) and WIndows XP/Vista.

According to Apple, Safari 4 tops IE 8 and Firefox by three times or more when loading HTML Web pages. With its Nitro JavaScript engine, the company claims, Safari executes JavaScript almost eight times as fast as IE 8 and more than four times as fast as Firefox.

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Laughing-Samurai (not verified)

at 18:40 on June 12th, 2009

I used Safari 4.0 throughout the Beta period and I was happy with it. Since we now have the full software, it's now a great browser which will get even better with the release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in Sept.

Tilosj

at 15:19 on June 12th, 2009

I am a PC user. But, always liked the notebook from Apple. Now, it launched the 4.0 version of Safari that the most stable. There is news that I find in other browsers installed on my desknote: IE8, Chrome and Firefox. Of these, frequently using the Chrome and Firefox. The operating system was Windows Vista Ultimate. Windows 7 RC was using the in dual boot ... uninstall the Vista and use the Win 7RC. So far I like the Safari that is faster than other browsers and very intuitive. Some bugs were fixed ... I think it is worthwhile to test it. PS: I'm using Google translator, ok!

Tilosj has contributed a photo to this story.

Paschen

at 16:23 on June 12th, 2009

I must have missed the announcement on that one.

Tilosj

at 18:12 on June 12th, 2009

About four times the Safari 4.0 froze when used in Windows OS 7RC. You need to Ctrl + Alt + Del to terminate and restart the browser. Therefore, still using Firefox which has no problems and is more stable, but Safari 4.0 has demonstrated to be faster in the open sites and stable at the beginning. I am waiting for Apple to resolve this problem.

PS: Using the Google translator.

israeli.agent

at 18:14 on June 12th, 2009

In the last time when used Safari, I gave up in between. Being an active "downloader" , I found the browser does not adjust the download speed dynamically to the available bandwidth.

Will try sometime and give an update.

.Agent.

quotato

at 20:48 on June 12th, 2009

The binary setup file is 27.15 MB. I wonder what kind of hidden features are working behind the scenes and sending information to the builders. I know Safari is not bloatware. Yet, all Apple produced software has too much MBs in the initial file.

Pythiian1

at 22:05 on June 12th, 2009

It's so much better than Firefox, and yes, it's faster too! I've yet to test how it will work in NP environment for uploading stories and such.

kimmo (not verified)

at 06:05 on June 13th, 2009

Still very buggy on Tiger. Totally unusable. Fast it may be, but if it crashes and freezes and gives blank screen every 2 minutes, i'm in no hurry.

grytr (not verified)

at 09:51 on June 25th, 2009

I use Mac and PC. I recently downloaded and installed Safari 4 on two PC's. A laptop running XP and a vista desktop. I am VERY impressed with the performance of Safari on many of my common websites. For example, load news.bbc.co.uk or en.wikipedia.org and compare load times with your favourite browser. I use Firefox myself.

However, and it is a big however. Safari crashes too often to be usable. I have reverted back to my Firefox. I did try and diagnose the problem but apple recommends disabling installed plug-ins then re-enabling them one by one until you find the problem. No way. Not my job. Particularly as the problem seems to be OS independent.

Another thing. Safari (on the PC) does not appear to allow you to change your search provider to anything other than their choice of google or yahoo. I use google. I like google. However, I use http://google.co.uk/ not the google.com that apple has hard coded into Safri.

I therefore give this a miss for the moment.