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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.

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Who has the market share? by MrLogic17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read the very short article, so you don't have to.

    Windows is the bulk, at 91.68%, of that Windows 7 is 51.22%

    Mac is 6.64%

    And overall, Linux is 1.68%

    1. Re:Who has the market share? by Travis+Mansbridge · · Score: 5, Informative

      To be fair, this data is generated via pageviews. Since there are many computers running linux out there whose sole purpose is to serve data rather than consume it, that portion may be underrepresented here.

    2. Re:Who has the market share? by Number42 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Since we're talking about desktop market shares here, Linux's number isn't that far off. It doubtlessly dominates the server market alongside BSD, though.

    3. Re: Who has the market share? by loufoque · · Score: 5, Funny

      I feel good knowing I'm part of the 1%.

    4. Re:Who has the market share? by GreatDrok · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Mac remains the desktop fashion accessory for those who care about style over function"

      This is a very myopic view of the Mac. In some fields, particularly scientific fields, Macs are a better solution than Linux and have gained considerable support. It isn't because it is a fashion accessory, it is because it is a fully fledged UNIX with all the same open source tools as Linux, plus a bunch of commercial software that Linux lacks, all on hardware that is well specified, long lasting and well designed. I've had my share of PC hardware cobbled together to get Linux on my desktop but in the end a Mac is more cost effective and a better solution. Our site's Linux fanboy admin even bought a MacBook Air for his own use and now won't spec anything non-Apple for our users regardless of the OS they choose because we've had such bad experience of poorly made PCs.

      --
      "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  2. False count by frovingslosh · · Score: 5, Funny

    It looks like this count is coming from someone monitoring what OSs they see in use. That being the case, it must be greatly under-counting Windows 8 and Win 8.1, since while they may be on many more computers, they are unusable.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  3. Re:People hear "Windows 8" and run away by JMZero · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you piss around with Windows 8 for a while, you can basically simulate Windows 7. But for a long time, you'll still bump into horrible garbage - like "you wanted a weird, functionless fullscreen app to view an image file, right"? Very few things are real showstoppers, but lots of stuff is just a little worse - like they abandoned all the little refinements they've made to progressive versions over the years. Little stuff, like the behavior of the "run" dialog. It used to autocomplete well, and seemed to usually know what you wanted. Now it doesn't.

    My job has me doing development on a Windows 8 machine - and it's gotten down to very few times a day I say "oh God, really?", but it's taken a lot of tweaking and adapting to get there. And there's literally nothing I actually prefer about 8. Lots of it just evidences horrible testing/design. Like your default start screen has a tile for the "math input editor" or something. That's a very narrow niche app for a desktop, non-touchscreen computer, and it doesn't work the way anyone expects. Many times I've been asked "what the heck does this do?" - and it actually took me a while to figure out. Obviously that doesn't hurt anyone much to have a stupid, useless app - but the same lack of design pervades the whole product.

    It's just a half-baked mess, and I think it's earned it's poor reputation very well.

    --
    Let's not stir that bag of worms...
  4. 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.