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For October, OS X 10.6 and iPhone OS 3.0 continued to make incremental gains in market share, as did Safari. Unfortunately for the Apple web browser, Google’s Chrome is gaining faster.

Compiling data from more than 160 million visitors to its worldwide network of sites, web metrics firm Net Applications has released numbers for the month. For web browsers, Internet Explorer still represents more than 60 percent of the market. That would be great for Microsoft, if it weren’t for the fact IE is down about 10 percent from a year ago and Firefox is up about 5 percent. Safari now stands at 4.4 percent, up from 4.24 percent in September, and 2.87 percent last year, and that’s great, but not as great as Chrome.

Based on WebKit and released just over a year ago for Windows, Google’s Chrome is now at 3.57 percent, up from 3.17 percent in September. Chrome’s rate of growth, plus the imminent release of a Mac version, as well as one for Linux, leads inexorably towards Chrome passing Safari, most likely by year’s end. The problem with Safari is that the Windows version just never caught on. After more than two years, its market share is yet to reach a third of 1 percent. To put that in perspective, more people browse the web with Safari from an iPhone than Windows.

As for iPhone OS, it continues to trend slowly upward. At 0.37 percent in October, and combined with 0.07 percent for the iPod touch, iPhone OS now measures 0.44 percent of total OS market share. While that may seem insignificant, it’s a little less than half what Net Applications reports Linux as having. Unlike Linux, the iPhone OS is steadily increasing share, and with the introduction of the iPhone in China and the U.S. holiday season, iPhone OS may break half a percent by the end of the year. To put that number in perspective, it’s about a 10th the market share of Mac OS X.

Nonetheless, Mac OS X continues to make small, steady gains in market share. OS X was at 5.26 percent for October, up from 5.12 percent in September — so much for Windows 7 hurting the Mac. Even better, a year ago OS X was at 3.79 percent, and a year before that at 3.43 percent. By October 2010, it’s quite possible OS X will have doubled its market share in three years. At 7 percent, that wouldn’t quite be the “rounding error” Steve Ballmer recently suggested OS X was when compared with Windows.

Regarding market share by version, after jumping to 18 percent in the month after release, Snow Leopard increased to just 21 percent of OS X users for October, with plain-old Leopard accounting for 50 percent of the user base. While that’s something of a plateau, it will be interesting to see how adoption between Snow Leopard and Windows 7 compares. A week after the official launch, Windows 7 is at 3 percent, up from 2 percent a week ago based on those using early release versions. Sounds like a rounding error to me.

A month after Apple made iPhone OS 3.1 available, version 3.1.2 for the iPhone and iPod touch can now be downloaded via iTunes.

Besides achieving version synchronicity (3.1.1 came with the 3G iPod touch), the update addresses issues with waking from sleep, cellular network disruption, and crashes while streaming video.

The most notable problem, the “iPhone coma” issue, resulted in some iPhones becoming unresponsive, touch controls not working, and phone not ringing when called. This required a hard reboot, but that was only a workaround. It’s still too early to tell whether 3.1.2 is a true fix for that pernicious issue.

Unfortunately, what was not addressed in the terse update log at all was battery life. That’s a little irritating because the problem has been acknowledged by Apple as “under investigation.” While fixes for issues relating to loss of network connection or random crashing/freezing are always welcome, those issues seem to affect a relatively small number of users. The battery life problem likely impacts most iPhones, if not most iPhone owners, the latter being dependent on how the individual uses the iPhone. Still, one hopes there is an iPhone OS update coming that will address the power management issue, and sooner rather than later.

In addition to the iPhone OS update, there is also a carrier update, version 5.6, but no info on what it does.

Just over a month since Safari 4.0.2 made its way into Software Update, Safari 4.0.3 has arrived for Mac and Windows. The update weighs in at 40.5MB and will require a restart.

In addition to the boiler plate “improvements to stability, compatibility and security,” Safari 4.0.3 purports to address:

• Stability improvements for webpages that use the HTML 5 video tag
• Fixes an issue that prevented some users from logging into iWork.com
• Fixes an issue that could cause web content to be displayed in greyscale instead of color

Additionally, security content includes several fixes relating to visiting a “maliciously crafted website” where unexpected arbitrary code execution hijinks may ensue. For those like myself who use Top Sites, without this update it is possible for a “malicious website to promote arbitrary sites into the Top Sites view through automated actions.” This could be used to facilitate a phishing attack, or possibly get you in trouble with a spouse if porn thumbnails starts showing up in your Top Sites.

System Profiler reporting 13″ MacBook SATA speed

A week after reports first surfaced of a downgrade in SATA bus speeds, Apple has issued a fix that both solves the problem and puts an end to conspiracy theories about it.

The issue centered around new MacBook Pros having a SATA speed of 1.5 gigabits, down from 3 gigabits on previous models, including the low-end MacBook. While there would be no performance degradation on any MacBook Pro with a mechanical hard drive or standard solid-state drive, there was at least a theoretical decline in performance for those with faster SSDs, like the Intel X-25M.

MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 “addresses an issue reported by a small number of customers using drives based on the SATA 3Gbps specification with the June 2009 MacBook Pro.” Interestingly, there is also a caveat: “While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.”

As the owner of a unibody MacBook, I can report that my “unsupported” Intel X-25M has run like lightning for six months and counting. The real issue here isn’t about unsupported drives, but how something like this slipped through Apple QA. Nonetheless, those considering upgrading their drives can now be confident of the best performance, be it real or imagined.