Perhaps I should have said more viable choices when I mentioned I would like to see more choices of Web Browsers. By viable, I mean something that clearly beats Internet Explorer.
As an example, When Netscape came out, it clearly beat out NCSA's Mosaic
Browser. When IE came out, it clearly beat Netscape, but that was through back-handed illegal deals.
Where Opera failed is that even though it was faster than IE, it didn't support all o the same features and it cost money to use it. The choice consumers had was to use something free and pre-loaded on their system (IE) or pay and download something that might be better, if they heard about it at all (Opera, Netscape, others). Eventually, both were made free or had free versions. Trying to overcome the hurdle of free is very difficult. Even with the incredible hurdles Microsoft made their consumers jump through to use the product. Every time a consumer downloaded a new version, it disabled the old one. Talk about attrocious customer service! But even with all of that, people stuck with IE because it was the choice in front of them.
It is quite possible to release a product that could be an IE killer, especially with Microsoft looking to make things more difficult for consumers. What that might entail, I don't know, but it is possible.
The thing that will make Safari successful is if it clearly beats out IE enough that people stand up and notice.
The other thing that could make Safari successful is if Microsoft kills IE for the Mac, but that is not a very desireable way to beat IE.
As far as users go, the largest collection of Non-IE users was Netscape 3.01 and that comprised a little over 1% of the people accessing my site. The next biggest is actually the google crawler!
