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Topic: Operating Systems

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

Summary: 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.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

By for Hardware 2.0 |

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.

Topics: Operating Systems, Apple, Browser, Hardware, Microsoft, Software, Windows

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12 comments
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  • Spinning yarn with NetApplications? It's data are skewed and artificial.

    nt
    Dietrich T. Schmitz, Linux Advocate
    Reply Vote

    • Any other source for stats?

      Aside from NetApplications, who else keeps track of this? If NetApplications' numbers are skewed, I'd like to see who else is keeping track and compare those stats. If several organizations are keeping track, view them all side by side and then we can determine who is skewing numbers.
      davidr69
      Reply Vote

  • Yeah yeah....

    I would say if they use he hard data and don't skew it at all I would say its a good snapshot. Not perfect but I would assume they are close. Especially for all the Apple numbers because most Apple computers are connected to the internet. Same is not true for all Windows systems. Its just a snapshot not die hard numbers.

    Is it that they don't mention Linux at all?
    OhTheHumanity
    Reply Vote

    • thats because everybody knows that Linux

      is growing at an unprecedented and mind boggling phenomenal rate so there really isn't any need to embarrass M$ or crApple.

      plus the fact that peopel who use Linux hide their information online to keep M$ from trying to sue them for some type of IP infringement because they use Linux and not Windoze!
      Ron Bergundy
      Reply Vote

      • Nice

        Conspiracy theory you got going there...
        The one and only, Cylon Centurion
        Reply Vote

        • I think he was being sarcastic...

          Having said that, I also beleive that Linux and Windows are underreported because many servers (and we have rooms full of both Windows and Linux servers, not to mention VM's) are never used to access the web.
          otfs
          Reply Vote

          • Lovey Dovey does sock puppet

            Same ridiculous wide-eyed naivety that Loverock Davidson has. To generate mouse clicks, no doubt. ;)
            still not nice
            Reply Vote

          • But...

            The same can be said of all the Mac servers as well. You do realize Apple
            sells servers too?
            gtdworak
            Reply Vote

          • Don't forget the Linux and *BSD servers.

            [b] [/b]
            AzuMao
            Reply Vote

  • User Agent Switcher on Firefox

    This Firefox add-on gets about 27,000 downloads a week. In terms of the raw numbers, who knows how much Firefox users employing this ad-on skew the numbers?

    It's not hard to make your OS and browser look like something else. There's more than a few web sites that are supposedly IE and Win only that unwittingly have Firefox users running Linux. Unless they employ a Windows executable with DirectX dependencies, their restrictions are bogus.
    djchandler
    Reply Vote

    • Unless it requires features from DirectX 10/11, they could still be bogus.

      [b] [/b]
      AzuMao
      Reply Vote

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

    Palm and Blackberry should start making windows phone 7 and android phones. They have no chance of surviving with their own os in the big fight against Microsoft, Google and Apple. Only Nokia looks capable of competing with this triumvirate of innovative tech titans.
    kdsandeep@...
    Reply Vote
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