Trendwatching - Chrome, Windows 7 and Mac OS X make good gains in March

The new data is in from Net Applications and it shows that Google's Chrome browser and Microsoft's Windows 7 made significant usage share gains during March.

Google's Chrome browser broke the 6% usage share mark, ending the month at 6.13%, up from 5.16% in February. Compare this to Internet Explorer, which slipped nearly 1%, down from 61.58% in February to 60.65% in March. Firefox, Safari and Opera also made small gains.

Transition of users from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6 has been strong. Usage of Firefox 3.5 dropped from 14.54% in February to 9.28% in March, while Firefox 3.6 usage shot up from 5.16% to 11.25% during the same period. 3.20% of users are still using Firefox 3.0.

On the operating system front, Windows 7 market share increased from 8.92% in February to 10.23% in March. Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 also gained ground, up from 1.88% to 2.13%. Despite slipping over 1%, Windows XP still holds a usage share of 64.46%.

Overall, Windows has lost market share, down from 92.12% in February to 91.58%. Meanwhile Mac OS X grabbed ground, up from 5.02% to 5.33% during the same period.

Net Applications measures operating system usage by tracking computers that visit the 40,000 sites monitored for clients, which represents a pool of about 160 million unique visitors each month. This data is then weighted based on the estimated size of each country’s Internet population.