Interesting usage share shakeup during December
During the month of December, web metrics firm Net Applications picked up on some interesting web trends.
Let's begin by looking at operating system usage trends.What's interesting here is that while usage share for Windows, Mac and Linux remained virtually unchanged (Windows and Mac both made a tiny loss while Linux made a tiny gain.
- Windows XP: 67.77%
- Windows Vista: 17.87%
- Windows 7: 5.71%
- Mac OS X 10.5: 2.47%
- Mac OS X 10.6: 1.60%
- Linux: 1.02%
What's interesting looking at the data for Windows is that while Windows 7 is making good gains, these gains don't make up for the drop in XP and Vista usage.
Looking at operating systems on a finer scale, mobile operating systems saw a huge explosion. Here are the gains for the month of December:
- Android: +54.8%
- Blackberry: +22.2%
- iPhone: +20.1%
- Symbian: +19.0%
- Java ME: +15.6%
Mobile operating systems now account for 1.3% of all operating systems accessing the internet.
On the browser front, there have also been some interesting moves. While it was expected that Internet Explorer would continue to lose ground (this has been happening since July 2009), it comes as a bit of a shock to see Firefox slip after several months of growth (slipping from 24.72% in November to 24.61% in December). Also, while Apple's Safari gained ground, that gain wasn't enough to prevent Google's Chrome browser from making it into third place.
Here's how the browser stood in December:
- Internet Explorer: 62.69%
- Firefox: 24.61%
- Chrome: 4.63%
- Safari: 4.46%
- Opera: 2.40
Here's a look at the versions:
- Internet Explorer 6.0: 20.99%
- Internet Explorer 8.0: 20.86%
- Firefox 3.5: 16.32%
- Internet Explorer 7.0 15.53%
- Firefox 3.0: 6.91%
- Chrome 3.0: 3.75%
- Safari 4.0: 3.45%
- Internet Explorer 8.0 - Compatibility Mode: 2.80%
- Opera 10.x: 1.58%
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.