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Windows XP Falls Below 25% Market Share, Windows 8 Drops Slightly

Posted by Soulskill on from the year-of-something-on-the-somethingtop dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Despite support for Windows XP finally ending three months ago, the ancient OS has only now fallen below the 25 percent market share mark. To add to the bad news for Microsoft, after only nine full months of availability, its latest operating system version, Windows 8.1, has lost share for the first time. For desktop browser share, Chrome is up, taking mostly from Internet Explorer and Firefox. For mobile browsers, Safari continues to fall while Chrome maintains strong growth.

1 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Re:XP losing Market share is not bad news. by Teckla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm typing this on a nine-year-old Dell Latitude D410 running Windows XP. I've got a current version of Firefox, current versions of all of the plugins I use on a regular basis

    Your fully patched browser and plugins still make heavy use of operating system DLLs, and those DLLs are no longer getting security updates. This puts you at risk.

    Continuing to use old hardware is fine, as long as the OS is updated and secure. I have a similarly old machine that I put Linux on.

    I'm afraid your highly modded comment might make non-technical people think using XP to browse the web is still OK. It's not. Even with a fully updated and patched browser.