Mozilla pours scorn on Apple's Safari download claims

Apple has trumpeted figures showing that 11 million copies of Safari 4 have been downloaded in the first three days of release.

This included six million downloads of the Windows version of Safari, and was heralded as an "incredible success"

Apple also highlighted stats claiming it executed JavaScript more than four times faster and loaded HTML web pages more than three times faster than Firefox 3.

However Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Mozilla, hit back at Apple in his blog, claiming that the figures didn't mean anything as it didn't say whether they were unique, new downloads, updates from beta or updates from previous major releases.

Dotzler said: "I'm not the first to suggest that most of those downloads probably were not actually users seeking out Safari 4 but rather were users receiving and accepting the automatic update from Mac or from the Apple Update Service from Windows."

He also claimed just how much he believes Safari has to grow to match Firefox in the browser market, with a latest update to Firefox 3, Firefox 3.0.11, downloaded 150 million times in 24 hours.

Apple released Safari 4 last week. Click here for an IT PRO need to know fact sheet on the new browser.