Business Insider is reporting that the marketshare for Google Chrome is accelerating at a rate that’s faster than Safari. It’s not really all that surprising since Safari is synonymous with Apple Computers and Google is synonymous with computing in general. This might be the case of user perceptions more than it is about browser growth.
According to Henry Blodget, “Google’s Chrome and Firefox are gaining lots of share. Apple’s Safari is gaining a tiny bit of share. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is falling out of bed”
Apple’s clearly failing to market Safari to Windows users. According to their numbers Chrome has increase it’s market share by 7% while Safari has only increased by 2% over the last twenty months.
We’re speculating, at best.
The thing that Silicon Valley Insider missed was that there may be a mental divide between Apple and Microsoft based users. If something carries an Apple logo, it’s assumed that it’s for OS X based computers, unless it was installed along side hardware that works on their systems (ie. iPods). Until Apple figures out a way to breach that divide, Safari will continue to lose ground to Chrome.
The funny thing about this is that Chrome and Safari are both built on Apple’s Webkit rendering engine.
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WebKit isn't Apple's rendering engine. It's open source. Apple has contributed to it, but it was around before Apple started using it and lots of other people and companies (including Google) contribute to it.
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LikeWebKit was created by Apple from the KHTML engine (which still exists). Apple then open sourced the project a couple years back. While others can contribute to the rendering engine, Apple still retains control of committing the code. The term open source isn't synonymous with an ownerless project.
You may want to check out the wikipedia article on webkit, and the webkit.org site for more information.
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