As is often the case when people are discussing the browser market, there has been a spate of articles around this EU anti-trust thing that claim something along the lines of "Safari has eaten into I.E.'s market share."
This just isn't true. I.E. faces next to no competition from Safari. Safari has approximately one third of one percent of the usage share on the Windows OS and that's been essentially flat the entire first year of Safari on Windows' existence.
Another way of looking at this is to measure actual user ratios rather than usage. The numbers are less good here but approximations can help put the growth of the Internet itself into the equation. It's a safe bet that in 2008, Safari's first year of availability on Windows, Microsoft added at least 200 times more I.E. users than Apple added Safari on Windows users. No, Safari is not eating into I.E. in any way.
Now, it's reasonable to say that there is some competition at the OS level where Apple's Mac OS X has taken some market share from Microsoft's Windows. That's where all of Safari's real growth has come from. But that is not the same thing as I.E. facing competition from Safari and until we see some data suggesting that some non-trivial number of people are choosing Mac OS X over Windows expressly because they prefer Safari to Internet Explorer it sure would be nice if the tech press stopped muddying the waters with this talk of Safari's impact on I.E.
The truth of the matter is that I.E. faces almost no real consumer pressure from any browser except Firefox. Chrome may eventually assert itself on Windows some, but today there just isn't anything except Firefox that's doing anything to challenge Internet Explorer. I think that's unfortunate (and thanks be to Mozilla without which everyone would probably still be using I.E. 6) but as I said in my previous post, there's just no viable way to effectively compete commercially with Microsoft when they have locked up the most valuable distribution channel and what success Firefox has had against I.E. is attributable to factors not readily available to commercial competitors -- including but not limited to massive grassroots volunteer development and advocacy/distribution communities.
