[azakai]

The answers are pretty obvious.

1. Chrome is marketed all over the web (and in real life) and bundled through shareware. Google is spending a tremendous amount of money to market Chrome. Apple is not doing that with Safari.

2. Safari is the default in OS X, but OS X is still small compared to Windows.

3. Safari on Windows is not as fast as Safari on OS X, presumably because Apple cares more about one than the other, whereas Chrome is fast on both platforms. The author seems to assume that since they are both WebKit browsers, that means they are the same, but that isn't true by any measure: First, Google doesn't use the WebKit multiprocess code or the WebKit JS engine, it has its own, and both of those components are very important for speed; and second, even aside from those there are many factors that go into making a browser fast, and just using WebKit (or Gecko or Trident or whatever) doesn't fix them automatically.

The real question is how many people use Safari on OS X. That's where it is optimized and bundled. I am guessing the percentage is pretty high, but if it is low, then that would be a surprising fact that requires explanation.

[ootachi]

Using John Gruber's publicly reported stats as one data point, Safari commands a majority share on Mac OS X.

[toddheasley]

I work for a very large (Fortune 500) retailer whose customers are overwhelmingly Mac users. Safari users make up just shy of 50% of all of our traffic, with Chrome accounting for 25%.

I'd guess that's as much because Safari is the built-in, default option on OS X and iOS as it is because Safari is just super awesome. The more interesting thing to me is that all of my (Mac-using)coworkers have switched over (mostly from Firefox) to Chrome, despite Chrome's overall jankyness on OS X.

[xenomachina]

Are these stats based on his site's users? If so then I'd expect them to skew towards Apple fanboys, not just Mac users. I use a Mac, but I can't stand to read Daring Fireball. It's like the Fox News of tech blogs.