Safari is faster than either across almost all dimensions, lighter on battery, nicer UI, better standards support generally than FF and even matches chrome for what I care about. It’s the clear best browser imo.
We're talking about web browsers. Pretty much everyone with a personal computer(including smartphones) needs one. The US makes no sense as a subset here. If we were discussing what markets for a company to target, then sure. But we're not, are we?
I and many people here abandoned Chrome, so it’s only relevant to me from a software development perspective.
In terms of software development a US specific audience isn’t uncommon. Local utilities and many government agencies etc just don’t care about foreign users.
> Unless you’re equally interested in non English speaking users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.
The US is not even the largest English speaking population, it’s India. Additionally, if a subset is to be chosen, why is this subset from the US? Why does it get to be the centre of the universe, especially for a general-use product like a web browser?
The point was it’s rare to care about global numbers, not that the US is the only meaningful subset.
As to why a US only subset may be reasonable vs a language specific subset, some US government agencies care about a global audience but many are US specific. They may have multiple languages because Americans aren’t all fluent in English.
The US is hardly representative. Globally, 25.3% of website visits happen from a device running iOS or MacOS. That's impressive, but still a mere quarter. Windows (29%) and Android (40%) each account for more users.
Which isn’t actually relevant to any specific website as they all favor either some subset of users and generally a subset of their devices. Ie: Fewer than normal stack overflow users are coming in on cellphones let alone PlayStations.
You need to know your target audience, not simply lookup overall statistics. I’ve seen Windows make up less than 4% of all users and I’ve seen it be over 90%.
Statscounter is a popular statistics for platforma usage, but I strongly doubt that it is heavily biased. I've never found that any websites use statcounter (though I haven't aggressively investigated), and never found installation guide in Japanese. Perhaps is userbase biased to smaller websites on some countries?
I can run Chrome and Firefox on my Debian laptop and on my Android devices. How do I benchmark Safari there? I can't, so Safari is barely relevant to me. Nice to know that it's faster than the other two browsers on Macs, but I'm not very surprised. Apple should be able to integrate it with their hardware and OS more than Google and Mozilla.
It sure does. Did you even open OPs link? There you can compare everything.
And no need for Safari on Windows since you can compare Firefox on Windows (where those 'private api's' are not protected by Apple) with Safari on macOS
