Poll: Safari's Popularity Scorched By Firefox

A massive 65 percent of Macworld readers voting in a recent poll prefer to use Apple Computer's own Safari as their main Web browser.

But nearly a quarter, 23 percent, have opted to use Firefox as their main Web browser. Firefox's popularity has been increasing in recent months. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it had seen 25 million downloads of its Firefox browser in just 100 days.

Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker says: "Twenty five million Firefox downloads is a significant achievement, and we see that number continuing to grow. Firefox is being rapidly adopted by the mainstream, with this audience embracing Firefox as a more user-friendly Web browsing solution."

Just 5 percent of the 1882 Macworld readers voting in the poll use Internet Explorer. Users of alternative browsers account for 7 percent: Opera (1 percent), OmniWeb (2 percent), Netscape (1 percent), AOL (1 percent), and other (2 percent).

Mozilla Update

Mozillla has issued an update to Firefox that improves stability and includes several security fixes. A must have update for the 23 percent of readers who have moved to the increasingly popular Firefox.

Firefox version 1.0.1 also displays international domain names as punycode, although it is still possible to display them as Unicode. Punycode is a transfer encoding syntax designed for use with Internationalized domain names in applications. It offers a bootstring encoding of Unicode to get around language specific characters.