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Ask YC Community: What browser do you use and why?
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)?
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoI 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.
- boucher 18y agoSafari 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 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/ http://webkit.org/blog/168/gdi-text-on-windows/
- bigtoga 18y agoFirefox 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.
- bigtoga 18y agoFound the link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_windows_market_share_triples_following_sw_update_push.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_win...
- rantfoil 18y agoTo 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.
- boucher 18y agoThe 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.
- boucher 18y ago"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.
- thomasswift 18y agosafari for everything, firefox for firebug and web developer and myspace(so when it kills the browser i don't kill my work flow)