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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
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The Winners and Losers of 2010

By | January 3, 2011, 2:10am PST

Summary: Now that NetMarketShare’s data for December 2010 is in the can, we can take a look at the winners and losers of 2010 in the browsers and operating systems category.

Now that NetMarketShare’s data for December 2010 is in the can, we can take a look at the winners and losers of 2010 in the browsers and operating systems category.

First browsers. Here the winner is clear - Google Chrome, which saw its usage share more than double, rising from 4.63% in December 2009 to 9.98% in December 2010. A missive rise which has seen the browser leap ahead of Apple’s Safari (which gained a little ground, up from 4.46% in December 2009 to 5.89% in December 2010) and Opera (which lost ground, going from 2.40% in December 2009 to 2.23% in December 2010).

The biggest loser on the browser front was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. IE saw its usage share fall from 62.69% in December 2009 to 57.08% in December 2010.

Firefox, once the pin-up browser for geeks the world over, saw its usage share fall from 24.61% in December 2009 to 22.81% in December 2010.

Internet Explorer 8 commands a usage share of 33.02%, Firefox 3.6 18.50%, and Internet Explorer 6 (yes, that old dog) still clings on to 13.06%.

Let’s take a look at operating systems. Apple had a mixed year. Usage share for Mac OS fell slightly, down from 5.11% in December 2009 to 5.02% in December 2010. Apple’s mobile platform iOS, did better with it’s usage share climbing from 0.53% to 1.69% over the same period.

Linux dawdled around the 1% mark all year.

Microsoft saw usage share for the behemoth OS Windows fall slightly too, down from 92.21% in December 2009 to 90.29% in December 2010. Windows 7 now commands a usage share of 20.87%, Vista 12.11% and XP a whopping 56.72%.

NetMarketShare uses data captured from the 160 million unique visitors browsing some 40,000 Web sites it monitors for clients.

Anyone want to make some predictions for what we’ll see for 2011?

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Topics

Operating System, Usage, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Web Browser, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, Internet, Software, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

All opinions expressed on Hardware 2.0 are those of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Every effort is made to ensure that the information posted is accurate. If you have any comments, queries or corrections, please contact Adrian via the email link here. Any possible conflicts of interest will be posted below. [Updated: February 23, 2010] - Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other actual/potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted so far on this blog.

Biography

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology -- whether that be by learning to program, building a PC from a pile of parts, or helping them get the most from their new MP3 player or digital camera.

Adrian has authored/co-authored technical books on a variety of topics, ranging from programming to building and maintaining PCs. His most recent books include "Build the Ultimate Custom PC", "Beginning Programming" and "The PC Doctor's Fix It Yourself Guide". He has also written training manuals that have been used by a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Adrian also runs a popular blog under the name The PC Doctor, where he covers a range of computer-related topics -- from security to repairing and upgrading.

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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
FAULKNE 13th Oct
Good day to confirm this comment I would appreciate T h e b e s t o f Z D N e t d e l i v e r e d your website very nice to everyone Yes, Oracle is the only one with shared-disk architecture, but that is there advantage. It means you can add or remove nodes and the database lives on. In a shared nothing architecture, if you lose a node, you lose the system. I'm sure Oracle appreciates EMC highlighting their advantage.I also desire to signal in your RSS feeds. Thank you as soon as once again and maintain up the great operate Awesome post! Thank you very much || thanks for nice content this is really benefit to me.
View in thread
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Server data just as interesting
Richard Flude 3rd Jan 2011
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/12/01/december-2010-web-server-survey.html

IIS going nowhere. Surprised?
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Actually, we're surprised you try so hard,
John Zern 3rd Jan 2011
Rich.
But then again, it proves that Linux and Apple servers are useful for at least one thing, not so much beyond that.

That was what you wanted all of us to know, right?

Thanks again, Rich
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
orendon 3rd Jan 2011
@John Zern
Linux is good also for number crunching, so top500 supercomputers. Network testing and is coming in the cloud and phone arena.
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orendon; apart from embedded, supercomputers,
Richard Flude 3rd Jan 2011
most of the internet infrastructure (dns, http, smtp), increasingly mobiles, tablets, SANs: what has open source unix ever done for us;-)
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I'll make a prediction
Cylon Centurion Updated - 3rd Jan 2011
Windows 7's share will rise, while XP's will fall like a rock. C'mon folks, it's 2011, time to shut off those XP machines for good.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005
Prediction or prayer?
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
ITOdeed 3rd Jan 2011
@Marco nn
It's a prayer. XP is clearly the OS for production.
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XP is past it's prime.
Cylon Centurion 3rd Jan 2011
@Marco nn

It's neither. Anyone still using XP is beating a dead horse. Let it go. Move on.

I can't help but laugh at folks who try to force feed it onto newer systems, where XP drivers aren't available, then of course I get asked dumb questions like "Why is Microsoft forcing me to upgrade?"
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005

"then of course I get asked dumb questions like "Why is Microsoft forcing me to upgrade?"

Because if you do not buy/upgrade (whether you need it or not) MS will NOT be getting richer than it already is at your expense?.... Really, what a dumb question.
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Really?
Cylon Centurion 3rd Jan 2011
@Marco nn

So just because they sell you software, upgrading is bad?
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upgrading is bad?
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005 :'So just because they sell you software, upgrading is bad? '

Upgrading is not, high handed attitude is ("Why is Microsoft forcing me to upgrade?".)





Why it's high handed attitude: The MS' efforts to kill XP.



MS Timetable
to kill XP
-PC manufacturers stop selling computers with XP installed.

-Microsoft stops selling XP altogether.

-Mainstream support (free live support and warranty support) ends. Free maintenance is limited to security fixes.

-All support for XP ends.

-And a lot more ...



At least, reliving XP when they need it (showing that nothing is wrong with XP, except the MS' greed).

-------



Ah, please don't be so disparaging (..but laugh at folks...) with folks who simply don't understand why something completely usable is not more, thanks to 'new drives', even more at this difficult economic time.
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Everything is wrong with XP
Cylon Centurion 4th Jan 2011
@Marco nn

It's 10 freakin years old for one...
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XP is already falling like a rock.
Lester Young 3rd Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005

The market share numbers for XP cited by Jason are inflated by the large number of pirate copies of XP throughout the third world and former eastern bloc. XP is no longer a majority of Windows usage in western Europe or North America, particularly among consumer systems.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-na-daily-20091023-20110102

Interestingly, the fastest uptake of Win7 in North America, percentage-wise, is in Mexico, which has the greatest share of XP users. The highest uptake of Win7 in the world is in Colombia, which was also heavily XP. So much for the myth of Win7 mostly replacing Vista.

My own predictions based on the established trends:

By the end of 2011, XP will represent less than 20% of Windows usage in North America. Consumer XP usage will be less than 15%. The evident decline will affect third-party support for XP, which will accelerate the trend.

The only thing XP has going for it is the perception of dominance and the belief that it will remain a de facto standard forever based on that mythic dominance. It ain't so.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Goldcds 3rd Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005 Why would I spend a huge amount of money and 3 or 4 or 10 hours to upgrade from a working OS to another crappy MS OS. I have an XP machine and it will stay an XP machine. If I was going to upgrade it I would go with Linux not Windows7. I have Windows 7 and it is OK but I strongly prefer Linux Ubuntu. It is much faster, much more stable, much easier and faster to install, it is more secure, it doesn't take any maintenance or expensive virus protection SW, it runs everything I want, including Windows programs through Wine, oh and did I mention it was FREE, and it is better. DUHHHHH This is a no brainer so I guess the people still using that old clunky Windows crap are brain dead.
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I'm glad you like Ubuntu.
Lester Young 3rd Jan 2011
@Goldcds

I tried it for a while. The hassles weren't worth it, so I wiped it off this machine. BTW, since you are still using XP and Win7, by your own standards you are "brain dead."
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@Lester Young; Ha,ha that is the (now old) MS' Motto: 'Linux?; I tried it for a while. The hassles weren't worth it' (At least try to change the order of the words)

Joseph Goebbels (now Ballmer?): 'If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. '
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
congalalalala 3rd Jan 2011
@Goldcds
yea, it's faster to install but you'll be left with a bloated station. try recompiling the kernel to achieve a custom and "slimmer" setting and you'll be doing it for hours if you don't know what needs to be ticked off and on. secure? yea right. the only reason it's "secure" is that most malware isn't compatible with it, which is something you should have understood by now. and wine is definitely not better in performance, it hogs more resources than your average windows platform running their legitimate programs.
from what i know, the only reason why some companies incorporate linux is that it's easier to modify it to run app servers by a fair margin, and at a minimal. you can't get decent enough support readily for these kinds of systems.
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Godwin's Law! You lose!
Lester Young 3rd Jan 2011
@Marco nn

When your reasoning fails, trot out the Nazi comparisons.

Nice cop-out, claiming that all those who have tried, and been disappointed by, Ubuntu are liars.
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Good for you
Cylon Centurion 4th Jan 2011
@Goldcds

Tried Ubuntu (And Linux) but to me, it is highly unusable as a main OS.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
none none 4th Jan 2011
@congalalalala

yea, it's faster to install but you'll be left with a bloated station. try recompiling the kernel to achieve a custom and "slimmer" setting and you'll be doing it for hours...

Try recompiling the Windows kernel and they will hunt you down.

If "bloated" means "recognizes any hardware you throw at it," then the Windows kernel is bloated too. And you can't even do anything about it.





happy
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
mheartwood 4th Jan 2011
@Cylon Centurion 0005

XP Pro x64 was never common, but since MS hasn't cut off support for it yet, you can't call it dead yet.
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But DonnieBoy said that Win32
Pete "athynz" Athens Updated - 3rd Jan 2011
and win64 (once he became aware of it's existence a few months ago when it's been around for years) was in a downward spiral, that Linux was going to take over... so this: Linux dawdled around the 1% mark all year. must be some sort of mistake...

Yeah DonnieBoy at a whopping 1% mark Linux will surely be much more relevant than Windows at a 90.29% share. Sure they lost a bit but they did NOT lose it to Linux as you claimed.

In other words DonnieBoy - you were wrong!

Although one thing I did not see was Android's market figures... if you bring up iOS then you should include figures for all the mobile devices or revise your statement on the Apple figures and leave iOS out.
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You have it all wrong.
Cylon Centurion 3rd Jan 2011
@athynz

Linux isn't taking over, it's ChromeOS that people will be switching to by the droves.
Oh and people will keep a legacy circa 1995 PC around for the off chance that they need to print, since Windows and Office is only good for formatting documents. Which will be kept in a specially designed refrigeration unit since it would run as hot as a thousand suns, and need extra support since they weigh a ton.

Lol.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@athynz
"Yeah DonnieBoy at a whopping 1% mark Linux will surely be much more relevant than Windows at a 90.29% share"...no far away of the true (if of innovation, solidarity and freedom we are speaking, obviously)
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
YetAnotherBob 4th Jan 2011
@athynz

You seem to be laboring under a misconception. The numbers quoted are what ships with the computer. That is 8% OSX, 1% Linux, 90% Windows and 1% nothing.

Those numbers are not what people are using. They are what is selling in new units.

OSX only runs on Apple, and Apple only runs OSX. OK, those numbers stand.

Windows currently ships Win7. Older computers shipped with XP or Vista versions of Windows. Older versions like Win 2K or 98 SE are still out there, but not many, mostly on very old hardware.

The 1% Linux are mostly servers. The 1% no operating system are also mostly used as Linux servers.

The Linux desktop installed base is mostly installed over Microsoft operating systems, and doesn't show up in these numbers. So, claiming that Microsoft dwarfs OSX sales is valid. But, since Microsoft sales numbers include Linux, the claim that Microsoft sales dwarf Linux numbers is not valid. The correct statement would be that Microsoft plus Linux installation dwarfs Linux installations.

Most Linux installations are not sales anyway. Many machines have both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine. Some even have them both loaded and running at the same time.

To get any meaningful numbers on Linux is hard. The best way may be by taking web site stats. Those vary anywhere from 1% to 25% for Linux usage. This Microsoft supporting site in another article gives figures of around 3% Linux usage at ZD Net. Many Linux users have the system report itself as IE on XP, even though it's really Firefox on Fedora. Total Linux numbers on the net are probably higher, more like 8%. Growth seems to be around 1% per year, or maybe a little less.

Microsoft reports around 10% to the SEC for real Linux desktop usage. That is probably close to reality. Linux desktop usage might top out at around 20% someday. Not real soon though.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Loverock Davidson 3rd Jan 2011
Linux dawdled around the 1% mark all year.
LOL!!! And next year that number will be less than 1% as people are leaving linux.

However this is a great opportunity for Windows/IE to pick up that extra 1%.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Marco nn 3rd Jan 2011
@Loverock Davidson
at least you have one motif to smile, because about browser, servers, phone and importance as leader company, you could cry...
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
Goldcds 3rd Jan 2011
@Loverock Davidson The only reason that Linux shows 1% is because people buy Windows machines and convert them to Linux. There is no way to measure this you freaking idiot.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
G Computer Network 3rd Jan 2011
@Goldcds these stats are about actual internet traffice from various browsers and OSes. So the 1% includes windows machines converted to linux.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
alkolkin@... 3rd Jan 2011
My comment is off topic, but as a user of Linux and Windows 7, and a witness to my friends' Macs, I believe that Windows and Macs will dominate the percentages for the foreseeable future.
Chrome will be great and inexpensive for web centric users, the dominant market place being home users and some corporations that want to enter the cloud. Home users will not switch to it en masse because they hear from Microsoft and Apple on the TV, in print ads, placements in movies, and from friends who have used the MS and Apple products for years. Corporations will not switch to the cloud en masse because the planning for and implementation of switching will be prohibitively expensive and subject the IT directors to disaster if security fails.
Linux is definitely not ready for the average user. Getting support is an abomination. Books are not up-to-date and the thousands of well-meaning, intelligent, and expert technicians respond in ways that are WAY too complex for the home user to understand. The number of distros and their alternate ways of handling various processes is mind-boggling and counterproductive for the average user.
Macs are beautiful in physical and graphical appearance, the support is amazing, almost beyond belief, and, for graphics and some scientific uses, ideal. However, the price is high, the economy is low, and inertia is strong. Apple has no reason to lower prices; its total profit is from the sum total of all its products and the imaginative creation of new products will allow them to grow based on the high price its products demand.
So, I believe that Microsoft will remain dominant in the foreseeable future, very slowly losing market share to Apple, but nevertheless remaining number 1.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
useds0134 3rd Jan 2011
@alkolkin@... Well said
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Broken site
daengbo 3rd Jan 2011
@alkolkin@...
I prepared a long and detailed response to your awesome post, the gist of which was that more players and OS diversity would make for a healthy ecosystem, but ZDNet ate my comment when it determined that I wasn't logged in (despite giving me no indication that I wasn't logged in to begin with, and showing a "log out" link for irony).

God, I hate this broken site. Commenting has been a solved problem for more than a decade. Can't a tech site get it right?
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re: Broken site
none none 4th Jan 2011
@daengbo

Can't a tech site get it right?

The truly sad thing is this tech site had it right a long time ago but has spent time and $$ turning it into this disaster one revision at a time.

But in all fairness, it's probably the suits at CBS who are responsible for this most recent case study in non-usability.





happy
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
james347 3rd Jan 2011
2010 Looser: Microsoft.

2010 Winners: Everyone else.
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Ubuntu will gain
olddogv 3rd Jan 2011
Faster & more secure than Win 7, in 4+ years has found & used all the odd-ball printers & scanners that I've found, all kinds of apps readily available free, and does not need a constant Internet connection to function. Navigates as easily as Win in "classic mode," includes a very capable OpenOffice. and requires less resource than Win. All ideal for Home or Student use, and fine for business use if not they don't depend on some special software. Also very easy to set-up dual-boot if needed.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
daengbo 3rd Jan 2011
@olddogv
Not going to happen. Ubuntu will continue to take over the Linux space, and Ubu might even hit 2% long-term, but Chrome OS (which is ultimately Linux, but will be broken out on reports like this article's) will probably make it to 2% before Ubuntu, and 5% long-term.

Linux in its current form is going nowhere on the desktop, and I say that as someone who has used it exclusively since the 90s.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
J Hartsock 3rd Jan 2011
90% + says it all...and the gainer in 2011 will be Windows 7 with XP hanging on by a real long tooth.

I have XP on my current PC (dual-boot Ubuntu Linux 10.10) but I am building a machine for Windows 7 which is not slow or bloated or overpriced.

I am mildly interested in experimenting with Chrome OS...but Windows 7 is a beautiful OS - I was a beta tester and loved the 6 months experience.
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
monkeyman1140@... 4th Jan 2011
Let me get this straight...people use Internet Explorer?!?
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
MACKENZI 10th Sep
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
SATURNINA 13th Sep
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
TOCCAR 25th Sep
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
CLAUDET 26th Sep
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
MEJIAHA 30th Sep
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0 Votes
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RE: The Winners and Losers of 2010
FAULKNE 13th Oct
Good day to confirm this comment I would appreciate T h e b e s t o f Z D N e t d e l i v e r e d your website very nice to everyone Yes, Oracle is the only one with shared-disk architecture, but that is there advantage. It means you can add or remove nodes and the database lives on. In a shared nothing architecture, if you lose a node, you lose the system. I'm sure Oracle appreciates EMC highlighting their advantage.I also desire to signal in your RSS feeds. Thank you as soon as once again and maintain up the great operate Awesome post! Thank you very much || thanks for nice content this is really benefit to me.

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