Firefox not converting 75% of users

An interesting piece of news on the FireFox wiki - "Currently, approximately 50% of the people who download FireFox actually try it and about 50% of those people continue to use it actively." Which means that 75% of those of us who download it don't become active users.

In a related note (as reported over at the Guardian) it looks like Steve Jobs of Apple is hinting at taking on FireFox with the aim of leaving Safari and Internet Explorer the only major players left standing (though the credibility of Apple's Safari browser has been severely dented by the host of problems present in it's initial beta release for Windows).

So, the browser wars are hotting up again and, for me, that can only be a good thing as rival developers seek to take control of the browser it pushes innovation and features which benefit us all.

Windows users flock to Safari

Windows users were blindingly fast off the mark to grab a free copy of Safari for Windows, which Apple announced at the start of the week. Just 48 hours later, more than a million copies of the software had been downloaded by droves of mere mortals and at least one celebrity.

Apple claims that Safari 3 is the fastest browser running on Windows, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, based on industry standard benchmarking tests. There were some security bugs reported, which Apple patched with the release of Safari 3.0.1 a few days later.

Safari 3 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.