what percentage of Macintosh users use the Safari browser vs. Internet
Explorer? The answer should be based on U.S. statistics.

Hello Helen48,

Getting numbers for Safari is pretty straight forward - it is unique
and 'new' so people are looking for it. Getting numbers for IE for the
Macintosh (or for any other Mac browser) is a little more difficult.

The best overall numbers I found were at
  http://www.doctor-html.com/agent_stats/
which has data for the last several weeks from a number of sites (the
comment near the top mentions 13 million hits per week). The Safari
numbers shown range from 0.56 to 0.78 percent or roughly 75000 hits a
week. The Macintosh numbers (all browsers) range from 3.68 to 4.96
percent or roughly 500000 hits a week. Also note that "Unknown" is
larger than both the Safari / Macintosh numbers. If IE is the most
used Mac browser, then the ratio is roughly 6:1 to 8:1 between IE and
Safari.

The only sites I found with a breakdown between IE on Windows and the
Macintosh are for much smaller samples. For example:
  http://ejk.cso.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest-month.html
has complete details. The summary at the top still does not break out
IE by platform, but the digging through the details shows something
like...
 509 hosts - Mac IE 5.0
 302 hosts - other Mac IE versions
 116 hosts - Mac Safari/85
  19 hosts - other Mac Safari version
or about 6:1 of IE use over Safari on the Macintosh. This is in the
same range as the much larger numbers above - I would conclude that
these numbers are close to the real value for US users.

Other references:
  http://www.macminute.com/2003/07/28/safari
  http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox23.html
One Stat indicates global use of Safari at about 0.25 percent,
compared to IE (all versions) of 95.4 percent.

  ://www.google.com/search?q=browser+statistics&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&cat=gwd/Top&start=40&sa=N
A search of Google's directory - has a number of statistics sites w/
Safari users. Mostly the smaller sites but have the details.

I would use these numbers with some caution. Several sites I visited
(but not listed) mentioned the errors in detecting browser type. For
example - Opera by default identifies itself as IE - so there could be
Mac Opera users you can't tell apart from Mac IE users. I would also
expect to see Safari to gain users as Apple continues to make
improvements and deliver it with updated Mac OS X versions.

Use a clarification request if you need to follow up with this answer.
  --Maniac