Statistics provided by Internet metrics company Net Applications confirm several trends in web browser and operating system usage. The Windows 7 operating system is still gaining market share mostly at the expense of its predecessors Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows XP lost another 1.05% of market share accumulating to a total market share loss of 10.21% since June 2009 or 7.07% since October 2009 the month Windows 7 was released. XP’s market share in April 2009 fell to 63.41% which is still the largest share by far.
Windows Vista’s market share is going down as well from 17.58% in June 2009 to 15.60% in April 2010. Windows 7 gained 1.45% of market share in April closing in on Vista with its market share total of 11.68%. It will take approximately another four months before Windows 7 will become the second most used operating system in the world if the current trend continues.
The market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped below 60% for the first time in April 2010 to 59.95%, a trend that is likely to continue in the next months. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will get momentum with the release of Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 8 on the other hand gained some market share but was not able to compensate for the market share drops of Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
The biggest winner is the Google Chrome web browser with an increase of 0.60% in April to a total of 6.73%. This increase was mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer as the other browsers remained fairly stable. Firefox 3.6 saw a huge jump in market share since January 2010 where it started with 1.15%. The browser has now a market share of 15.33% which come mainly at the expense of Firefox 3.5 which lost more than 11% since January.
It is somewhat surprising that Opera did not get any momentum from the browser choice screen in Europe and the release of Opera 10.50. Any thoughts on that? You can click on the images to go directly to the Netmarketshare website.
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This is not good. Mac’s are still only 5% of the market share??? How is anyone going to retire off of Mac users’ financials if it’s only 5%? Gotta recommend more people use Macs. They are virus free after all >:) Their advertising said so!
I’m not surprised as I too have made the switch from IE to Chrome. Although I have to say that majority of the the companies out there still uses IE as their internal browsers.
If Apple computers werent incompatible with a broad swathe of programs, more people would use them. They are also very expensive compared to a Windows machine that runs software that will actually work with all your devices. Is MSFT perfect? No. But AAPL computers are basically only for graphics designers and very casual users.
The net applications figures have in the past been criticised for being heavily weighted to corporate users; the variation in market shares from other surveys is huge; probably the best thing to take from any one source is trends, not absolute figures.
Tim I agree that the source of the information highly influences the statistic. If I compare what they post with what I see on my websites I do see a completely different picture (firefox being dominant and all).
Why there is no Linux Os in the List? I think many users around the world are using Linux as dual boot secondary OS in their computer. May the universal hardware support is what keeping them away from trustingly switch fully to Linux. But performance wise, Linux is still amongst the other proprietary operating systems.