Ok, I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here.
I'm a Mac user, have been for nearly 2 years now and I think buying a Mac was one of the smartest moves I made as a Microsoft developer; I can run virtual machines for everything I do, easily swapping between different OSes. I currently have XP, Vista and Win7 all on my Mac so I can easily test IE6 -> IE8 without any hacks.
But Apple can really piss me off some times. This week has seen WWDC going on in the US and by-and-large I've been underwhelmed by it, almost to the point where I'm just plain annoyed at Apple and their marketing attitude.
And today I read an article which really got me angry, Apple announced that Safari 4 has had 11 million downloads. Now if you read that article you'd think that Safari has become the most dominate browser on the planet. I mean, Safari has always been a bit-player running along behind the likes of IE and Firefox like the annoying yappy little dog trying to be one of the big fellows.
You know what, nothing has changed.
What Apple have failed to mention in their announcement is that Safari 4 is pushed out to all OS X 10.5 (and 10.6 beta users I guess) as a system update, and at that, a pre-selected system update.
So I've installed Safari 4, but I use it maybe 1% of my browsing time (I'm one of those really horrible people who uses an even more obscure browser, Opera :P), but hey, I'm part of the 11 million strong loyal Safari fan-base.
Sure Microsoft probably has IE8 listed as an update for Vista (work domain policy just auto-updates for me, I don't ever look at them) but I remember when IE7 was released for XP it wasn't selected-by-default as an install, it was an optional. Sure Safari 4 was an optional upgrade, but when something is optional by opt-out rather than optional by opt-in you find more people will not bother to opt-out.
Using Apple's logic we can say that 20 million people think Kevin Rudd is a good prime minister. After all, the population of Australia is 20 million, he's the PM and to the best of my knowledge there isn't any kind of coup d'état planned to remove him from power.
As the great Homer Simpson said "People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that".
Oh, and to close off, this post was written in Safari 4 on OS X ;).