Safari global usage share more than doubles since Feb.

Web analytics research firm OneStat.com revealed on Monday global usage statistics for leading Web browsers. Apple saw the global usage share of its Safari browser more than double since February, according to the report.

OneStat.com indicated that Safari increased its global usage share from 0.11 percent to 0.25 percent since February 2003. Based on KHTML from KDE’s Konqueror open source project, Apple’s Safari browser was released in January as a public beta test version. The software was downloaded more than five million times during its beta test, according to Apple. Apple released Safari 1.0 in June, along with a software development kit (SDK) that enables Mac OS X developers to embed the Safari HTML rendering engine in their own software.

OneStat.com reports shows that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers dominate 95.4 percent of the global usage share market. OneStat.com did not distinguish between Mac and PC platforms, though the company indicated that IE 6.0 took 66.3 percent of the overall market, IE 5.5 14.5 percent, IE 5.0 12.7 percent, and IE 4.0 0.8 percent.

Trailing Internet Explorer was Mozilla, the open-source Web browser available for various platforms including Mac OS X, with 1.6 percent (an upswell from 1.2 percent in February), Netscape Navigator had 0.6 percent, and Opera Software’s Opera browser took 0.6 percent.

OneStat.com’s reports are based on averages from last week. Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors to Web sites that utilize OneStat.com’s technology. The company indicates that its Web analysis gathering technology is installed on more than 50,000 Web sites in 100 countries.