Still Safari’s share erosion was much less than that suffered by Microsoft’s browsers, particularly IE, during the same period.
Apple’s Safari browser, like rival Internet Explorer (IE), has lost a significant number of users in the last two years, data published Wednesday showed.
The most likely destination of Safari defectors: Google’s Chrome.
According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online. But by last month, that number had dropped to 56%, a drop of 13 percentage points — representing a decline of nearly a fifth of the share of two years prior.
It was possible to peg the percentage of Mac users who ran Safari only because that browser works solely on macOS, the Apple operating system formerly labeled OS X. The same single-OS characteristic of IE and Edge has made it possible in the past to determine the percentage of Windows users who run those browsers.
Net Applications measures user share by sniffing the browser user agent string of visitors to its customers’ websites, then tallying the various browsers and OSes.
Safari’s share erosion was much less than that suffered by Microsoft’s browsers , particularly IE, during the same period.
