

Ask YC Community: What browser do you use and why? - ideas101

I just read that market share of Safari is increased by 3 times, which to me is not true unless all the users who downloaded Safari are also using it as their primary browser. So if you have safari but if you are not using it (for whatever reason) then you should not be calc as a part of market share. Just by forcing users to download your s/w doesn't increase the market share in reality. It would be interesting to know about popular browser within tech community and why (technically and by usability)?
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boucher
"which to me is not true unless all the users who downloaded Safari are also
using it as their primary browser"

Market share is not calculated by the number of downloads of a particular
browser. It is calculated by tracking the browser used to visit a particular
website, or a set of websites. Net Applications, publishers of this particular
fact, aggregates statistics across a large number of sites.

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epi0Bauqu
I use Firefox primarily, but I am not completely satisfied by any means. It
has memory issues, stalls sometimes, and crashes occasionally. I use it
primarily for the add-ons, in order of importance to me: Google Browser Sync,
Firebug, Web Developer, ForcastFox.

I also use both Safari (on Windows) and IE6/7 for development testing. I also
use Safari sometimes personally when I don't need Google Browser Sync
(bookmarks, passwords, tabs, etc.). I find it really looks better--something
they are doing with anti-aliasing I think.

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boucher
Safari uses its own text rendering engine, as opposed to the native windows
engine. The engine is designed to render text the same way Mac OS X does,
which differs from the way Windows does. There's a lot of discussion on the
topic, here is a relatively good primer:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html>

However, it's worth noting that this behavior is going to change soon. The
nightly releases of Safari are introducing support for text rendering that
matches the native OS.

<http://webkit.org/blog/168/gdi-text-on-windows/>

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rantfoil
To be honest, Safari is bloody fast. I was using it to fix some Safari JS bugs
the other day, and then was just blown away by how much snappier it feels --
even at a perceptual level that makes a big difference. I feel bad cheating on
Firefox, though.

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boucher
The release version of Safari is several times faster than the release version
of firefox. Firefox 3 will have pretty equivalent performance to the current
Safari 3, but I suspect that won't hold true for long. The WebKit team has
been doing an exceptional job at honing the performance of their engine.

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bigtoga
Firefox as main, IE7 as backup. Do you have the link to the article that says
Safari is up 3x? That's like saying Xobni has 50k users b/c 50k people have
downloaded it.

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bigtoga
Found the link:
[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_win...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_windows_market_share_triples_following_sw_update_push.html)

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thomasswift
safari for everything, firefox for firebug and web developer and myspace(so
when it kills the browser i don't kill my work flow)

