Why Hasn’t Safari Achieved Chrome-like Success?

This is a simple question, but a good one. What is it about Apple’s Safari browser that is holding it back from mass adoption? The first Windows release occurred long before Google Chrome’s existence, and for all intents and purposes, both are fast, competent offerings. Yet, Chrome came out in September 2008 and today by most reports has surpassed Mozilla’s Firefox in overall usage – a browser which saw its 1.0 version released in late 2004.

Both browsers run on WebKit, so at their heart, performance and rendering is about the same. Could it entirely be related to marketing that Google is doing so well with its Chrome? MG Siegler over at TechCrunch isn’t so sure, though I do think there’s a chance that might have something to do with it. I’ve never seen a commercial for Apple Safari, but have seen commercials for Google Chrome – and most recently, even Google+.

Most of these commercials I’ve seen during NFL games, and it goes without saying that commercials aired during those timeslots are going to be beneficial… the audiences are huge. But even without the marketing, would Chrome still not have sky-rocketed past Safari, which by some reports holds a ~7% marketshare? I think it would have.

I haven’t used Safari for quite a while, and there are a couple of simple reasons for it. Most Apple software on Windows feels unpolished, and I believe that to be due to the fact that it is. iTunes is horrible, and Safari always felt like a Mac OS X client simply ported to Windows. Using it also reminded me of using the browsers included with certain Linux desktops, such as Konquerer which just aren’t full-featured by any stretch. Safari does have some interesting features, but none that I’ve ever cared about.

Chrome on the other hand is polished, and offers tight integration to Google’s ecosystem which many people are tied into (myself included). A couple of reasons I like Chrome so much is its performance, omnibar (the ability to search or go to a Web address with the bar up top) and the ability to sync bookmarks, passwords and even extensions (this is imperative to me now).

As it appears to me, Apple just isn’t that concerned with achieving mass success with Safari for whatever reason. In the end, the same sort of question as this news post asks could also be asked about Opera. Opera has been around much longer than Safari, Chrome and even Firefox, yet its usage is about on par with Safari by most measurements.

For those curious, in January 2001, our stats showed browser usage as Firefox (43.01%), Chrome (23.21%), Internet Explorer (23.09%), Opera (5.06%) and Safari (4.62%). In December up to today, usage has been Firefox (40.16%), Chrome (29.18%), Internet Explorer (18.58%), Safari (4.70%) and Opera (4.67%). These stats are simple being based on just one website, but it’s clear that Chrome is growing fast while Firefox is decreasing in usage. At the same time, Opera lost enough usage to put Safari in the lead, but not by much.