Apple computers are always popular with the back-to-school crowd, and the Mac market share usually gets a bump this time of year. Piggybacking on that, Safari rose above a 5% share of the desktop browser market across all platforms for the first time, according to data released this week by NetMarketShare.
Chart by The Mac Observer, data from NetMarketShare report
The company reported that the worldwide desktop usage of Macs reached 6.45%, and in the United States it was 13.7%. Along with that, they reported that, as of September, the Safari browser topped the 5% mark for desktop browser market share. While our own John Martellaro recently called Safari a second-rate browser, it would seem that Safari still manages to have a growing following.
It has a ways to go to become a real player in the browser market, however. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still leads with a 54.39% share of the market. Behind that is Firefox with 22.48% and Chrome with 16.2%. Safari ranks next and leads Opera, which has only 1.67% of the browser market.