In May 2006 Safari's market share as measured by Net Applications was 3.26 percent.  One year later, Safari's market share measures in at 4.82 percent. To view Safari's growth over the past year, click here.  The rise represents a year-over-year growth of 48 percent (rounded to the nearest whole percent, actual rise is 47.8 percent) for the month of May

Month to Month Comparison
Safari experienced a 5.0 percent increase from April 2006 as it rose from 3.59 percent.  Safari has now experienced growth for two straight months dating back to April 2007 following a decline in March 2007 versus February 2007.  Note that the Safari data mirrors the behavior observed with Mac OS market share rise, decline, and rise over calendar year 2007.  You can read about the May 2007 Mac operating system data here.

Internet Explorer Continues Decline
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has fallen 7 percent (actual drop is 6.97 percent) since May 2006 84.16 percent in November 2005 to 78.67 percent in May 2007.  This outpaced the 5.9 percent year-over-year drop for April 2007 (78.03 percent) versus April 2006 (83.88 percent).  This demonstrates that Internet Explorer is loosing ground to other browsers and at an accelerating rate. Since January 2007 Internet Explorer has dropped 1.35 percent despite the release of Windows Vista.

Firefox Growth Continues
Mozilla's Firefox browser is up 37.7 percent year-over-year for May rising from 10.56 in May 2006 to 14.54 in May 2007.  This was below th 44.38 yearly percent growth from April 2006 (10.68) to April 2007 (15.42)

Commentary
The similarities between Safari and Mac OS market share behavior as measured by Net Applications give support to the notion that Safari can be used as a means to track Mac market share increases because Safari is only available for the Mac OS X operating system.  Although Safari is the default browser for Mac OS X, many Mac users choose to use other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Camino.  Therefore, one may conclude that  Safari data is likely to under represent the actual growth of the Mac user base.

Related Posts

• Net Applications May 2007 - Apple Mac OS Market Share rises to 6.46 percent - Mac OS X Intel rises to 2.51 percent