Mike Rundle over at Business Logs wrote Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers:

If you care about the Macintosh user base, then you should care about Safari. If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base. It’s quite simple.

… People don’t switch to Firefox because they’re eager to get rid of the float margin bugs in IE6 or want 24-bit PNG support with alpha transparency, they switch because they hate spyware and the Fox is billed as a better alternative to IE6.

But on Mac OS X, there is no IE6. The default browser for my operating system is elegant, spyware-free, standards-compliant, quick, and easy to use. Why would a normal Mac OS X user download Firefox when Safari does what they want? Firefox on Mac OS X looks bad, doesn’t load as quickly as Safari, and has some goofy bugs. I’m not saying that Firefox is a bad browser because it’s not, it’s terrific, but on Mac OS X it just doesn’t wallop Safari the same way it wallops IE6.

Personally, it is quite frustrating to have to fire up another browser just to visit a certain website that doesn’t work in Safari. Inevitably, it is some sort of banking or paystub site, but even some Web 2.0 sites don’t support it properly. It seems to be a numbers game with these folks, but to me the important number is the number of Mac users you make happy.

Now, I’ve found that a lot of Firefox on Mac users are Switchers that have recently moved over from Windows to the Mac, so that is understandable. I think that if they were to try using Safari more, they would start to prefer it.

That being said, I’m still going to support Camino, Firefox, and OmniWeb in WebnoteHappy so people can have their choice.

And in other news… IE5 for the Mac is officially dead. [via Michael Tsai]

It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple’s Safari.