Safari Dominating Mobile Browser Market
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While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser still has a strong hold on its leadership position in the traditional browser market, Apple’s Safari mobile browser has an even stronger grip on its top position in that market.
According to Net Applications:
- Safari claimed 77.6 percent of the mobile Web browser market in February.
- Opera Mini was a distant second with 9.1 percent of the market, followed by Internet Explorer with 5.1 percent.
- Netscape was fourth with 2.7 percent of the market, Blazer was fifth with 2.4 percent and Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer was sixth with 1.4 percent.
- Other browsers fill out 1.3 percent of the market.
- Barry Levine at NewsFactor points out the potential misreading on the popularity of BlackBerry’s mobile Web browser, which Net Applications indicates has a measly 0.07 percent of the market.
- “Some observers have pointed out that the BlackBerry’s share of mobile Web browsing is misleading in the Net Applications report, since sales reports show it has sold more units than the iPhone,” he wrote.
- “One question is whether its users are as intent on browsing the Web as iPhone users are. But another factor could be that its default browser is WAP-based rather than HTML, and WAP isn’t measured in the Net Applications report.”
- Apple’s iPhone claimed 66.6 percent of the mobile operating system market in February.
- Google was the overwhelming mobile search engine of choice, according to Net Applications, which indicated that the search giant claimed 97.5 percent of the global market in February, followed by Yahoo! with 2.0 percent.
- Meanwhile, on the more traditional desktop-based browser front, Internet Explorer held 67.5 percent of the market in February, followed by the ever-gaining Mozilla Firefox browser, which now has 21.7 percent of the market.
- Safari is third with 8.0 percent of the market, Google’s Chrome browser is fourth with 1.2 percent of the market, while Opera and Netscape both have less than 1 percent of the market.
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