what you say is true - but as long as the mac never gains on windows, safari users will never gain in numbers. so why bother?

This is not about Safari gaining in numbers. It’s about Safari users visiting your site. Ensuring compatibility with Safari will earn you page views and potential higher revenue, don’t you think?

It seems to me that users who are willing to spend the extra money to invest in Apple products would be the type of consumers I would like to attract. More disposable income and all that.

but as long as the mac never gains on windows, safari users will never gain in numbers. so why bother?

Not exactly true, since you are talking percentages. Even if mac’s never climb above 10%, as total net usage grows, so does mac real numbers.

That’s correct, max case.
Furthermore, with Apple due to use Intel microprocessors by mid-2006 and switch all its Macs to Intels by 2007, we will be experiencing a huge influx of Apple users on the Internet and very much potentially, greater number of Safari users.

Where have you gotten your 4% usage stats? On some larger sites showing global stats, I’ve not seen Safari above 1% as overall Mac usage is around 3-3.5%

Naturally I check to make sure that any site I build will work on Macs, since I’m in San Francisco and my Mac figures are higher than national or global numbers on some sites that are for places located in the SF Bay Area. But, I have to wonder that if you’ve tested something and it looks identical in Explorer, Firefox, and Opera that if something is amiss with it in Safari is this not a problem with Apple’s implementation of that browser?

I also think that your assumption of a mass transition of people from Windows to Mac might be the opposite unless Mac really drives down their price point. Who will spend $2000 on a Mac workstation, when you can get a comprable Windows one with what will soon be the same exact hardware for say, $800-1000? I bring this up because I’m working with a lot of print firms who are trying to limit their Mac usage as much as possible due to pricing issues.

The important thing about Safari percentage is not so much the overall number of users, but of the disproportionate influence they wield. A random Safari user is more likely to be the type of person that enthusiastically tells others of new sites, new designs, etc. They are the small audience that you want on your side!

Apple users are more likely to be pretty media savvy and gainfully employed. In my business we call them Superconsumers.

i am using Safari now - a lot of people use it

And don’t forget a very important segment of the Mac user base…the media. So, a reporter visits your site with Safari and it sucks, so much for good press relations.

I use Camino. it uses the firefox engine, but is way better than firefox. As a web developer, I find it easy to make a site that works in all browsers, but MIE is always buggy. if you stick to the w3c’s standards, you will find that safari works fine.

People use safari because of its stability clean interface, great rendering engine ( compare a page rendered in IE next to one rendered in safari and the difference is staggering ) and people use a mac because of its rock stable OS .. its hard to argue against the point that not one single virus has survived on the open web against its rock solid BSD UNIX foundation. I have heard the aurgument ” no one writes viuses for the mac because its such a a small user base compared to windows ” … that argument has very little validity simply due to the fact that there are enough haters out ther that get sick of hearing people like me talk about how virus free and stable OS X is…. these haters would write a virus or a worm in a second if it were as easy is it is to do so on windows. The reason it has not happened is because it is a challenge to the point of being almost impossible due to the closed kernel and resources architecture employed by MACH BSD used in the mac’s Unix based OS.

Michael, you might find it is common for businesses that try to limit using their mac usage due to a higher upfront capitalization end up losing money the long run due to down time and lost hourly billing every time some 13 year old script kiddy writes a worm that brings XP to screeching hault or some virus that is able to exploit one of the hunded external operating processes that the windows OS has going at any one time.

When Mac goes intel it will help .., the price of the Intel CPU is a magnitude lower than the G5 cpu bringing prices down and with it so easy to compile binaries for both CPU’s you will see a roadening of applications and apples amazing quality and integration on a computer capable of booting OS X, Windows XP and Linux all on the same box and rumor has it real time on the fly switching from OS to OS.

We use google analytics ( formaly Urchin ) and Hit box to track traffic to our website http://www.rhedsquare.com … presently Safari accounts for 6.3% of all visitors.

One does not per se test “compatibility with Safar.” Safari is not this special thing, like IE6, that misunderstands published standards and has a host of its own internal nonstandard commands. Write to Web standards, test on all the browsers you have (including other highly-compliant rendering engines, like those in Opera and Firefox), and most times you won’t have to worry about Safari “compatibility.”

JavaScript differences remain significant, though, and JS-heavy pages definitely need testing in Safari. Nonetheless, write to standards, not to browsers.

Thanks for the site! If you don’t even care about Safari (in my opinion it has by far the best HTML renderer), the resulting screenshot of your page (specially if you have a looooong page), is amazing.

Hope the do the same thing with MSIE 6. I have a Mac, and I can’t test it (don’t have VirtualPC), and would love to be able to test my sites with MSIE that way.

PS: My website gets 6,000 visits a day, from 4,400 unique IPs. 7% of those use Safari (statistics from Mint).

Thanks for repoting on this tool, it’s very helpfull.

AND, if Safari works, Konqueror works too since it’s the same engine… Apple liked khtml and borrowed it =)

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hey, is there a site for IE or firefox testing?

Just remember, this test is not flawless; for example, Gap.com directs you to an apology once it detects that your browser is Safari, but the results of this test do not reflect this. Of course, Gap probably knows how their site displays in Safari.

Why bother to support Safari? Imagine somebody saying, “My site is broken on IE, the default browser for Windows, but don’t worry, I made sure it looks hot and sexy on Firefox”. Not caring about Safari support means turning your back on most of the users of an entire operating system. When a site doesn’t display so well in my browser, I don’t hasten to visit it again.

If I am not mistaken the Windows version of iTunes uses an embedded Safari browser to display iTunes store and podcasts pages.

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I’ve been reading all these comments since a commercial site I’m developing does not work in Safari - it works fine in all other browsers. While tracking down display errors, I discovered that Safari is not CSS Level 2 compliant and the Apple developers site themselves say: “Safari is designed to provide the most complete implementation of the CSS specification. There are however, some CSS properties that are not available or only partially implemented.”
Tell me again how great this browser is? And if no one broke their backs making sites compatible with old standards, maybe Apple would move Safari into the mainstream and make everyone’s life easier. Kudos to Gap.com!

The snugtech link is not working anymore
check this http://www.browsrcamp.com/
there you can get free screen shots of how your page looks like in Safari browser…

has anyone seen a listing of those that safari does not support? Please post it here…please…anyone…

i’havnt tested my here yet but people have been complaining that they cant register when they use a safari- the snugtest link does not work and browsrcamp can seem to handle the request.

People, realize that these incompatibility issues are neither the fault of the designer nor the viewer. They are completely the fault of the browsers themselves. Just as you the viewer might never visit a site that looks screwed up in Safari, the coder might never even try to code a browser that doesn’t conform to
standards, especially if it has a whopping 1% of users.
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has anyone seen a listing of those that safari does not support? Please post it here…please…anyone…