While the sea remained calm in the waters of the stable Web browsers, February proved to be very stormy in beta Web browsers seas and the flagship was Apple’s Safari 4 beta this time. 

 

In the segment of stable Web browsers the top 5 remained almost unchanged, but in the beta segment, Internet Explorer did pretty well, while Apple scored big points with the beta version of Safari 4. 

 

Wonder where Firefox is? Mozilla has a different policy under which it does not promote its Firefox 3.1 and, as a consequence, it’s behind its competition in this segment. However, Mozilla has few worries because it has the strongest adoption rate of its latest stable Web browser.

 

According to data provided by Net Applications, Firefox still gained some market share in the month that just passed, but the growth level was lower compared to previous months. Internet Explorer lost a bit of pace and Apple scored a home run with the beta version of Safari 4. Net Applications data shows that Internet Explorer’s share decreased a bit to 68.17%, Firefox climbed to 21.96%, while Safari dropped from to 7.42%.

 

However, the market share loss recorded by Safari can not be explained by the daily data from Net Applications as Apple’s Web browser, declared the fastest Web Browser out there, showed gain after gain throughout February, as noted by TG Daily’s Wolfgang Gruener in an analysis on this subject. 

 

Nevertheless, the release of Safari 4 beta version was the second-largest beta Web browser release until now. This helped Safari overcome the 10% milestone in market share for the first time. More precisely, on February 28, Safari is listed with a 10.91% share. 

 

The Safari 4 beta climbed to 0.45% market share after one day, to 0.55% on day 3 and to 1.04% on day 4. According to sources inside Apple and to the data released by Net Applications, the total number of Safari 4 beta downloads was of about 11 million, which is a pretty good number for four days. 

 

Only Google managed to hit the 1% market share faster. It took only nine hours for its Chrome Web browser to get there.