Filed under: Odds and ends, Internet, Surveys and Polls
Mac share of web browsing goes up after Windows 7 launch
It may seem a little strange, or downright counter-intuitive, but Net Applications is reporting that Mac OS X's share of computers using the web grew from September to October this year, while Windows' share of browsers declined.Windows (all versions of the OS) totaled 92.54% of computers browsing the web, a .25% drop, while Mac OS had a 5.27% share, up 2.73% from September. The iPhone, by the way, had a month to month increase of 5.71%.
The numbers come from tabulating visits to 160 million websites.
Windows 7 got 3% share in the daily tracking, largely at the expense of Windows XP. If Microsoft was depending on Windows 7 to quickly stop the Mac momentum, it hasn't happened yet, but at the same time, most Windows upgrades take place when new machines are bought.
Also, the general release of Windows 7 didn't happen until October 22nd, so the jump in Windows 7 on the internet wasn't available for most of October except for pre-release users.
[via Fortune Brainstorm Tech]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Greg said 4:27PM on 11-03-2009
Maybe the features of Windows 7 made people realize that Windows was never going to make a giant leap forward. However, they could, by switching to Mac.
Reply
skalpa said 5:02PM on 11-03-2009
Or maybe is it just that the Macs market share has been regularly growing during the last years, and this has nothing to do with Windows 7 at all...
What a stupid article.
me said 5:58PM on 11-03-2009
Agreed, skalpa:
This article tries to pretend that its just "stating the facts," but one can twist numbers too. It's 5.71% "growth" is really just an increase from 0.35% to 0.37% of the total market, which is really pathetic. Will you report an infinite percentage of growth when a new web browsing device is released? An increase of 0% to anything higher would be infinite, after all.
Looking at the graph, this data is well within any margin of error. This Apple weblog is becoming more and more ridiculous as it tries to cater to its fanboys.
Jordan said 4:30PM on 11-03-2009
Someone please explain:
Windows has 92.54%
Mac has 5.27%
and iPhone has 5.71%
That totals 103.52%
Is the iPhone 5.71% on mobile use, as in they're just not telling how many WinMo users there are, or is it being counted in the same category as computers?
Also, how does Mac jump from 2.73% to 5.27% in one month....? This figure is based on web browsing and not market share...so does this mean that only half of Macs user base used the internet before hand and in one month they all started using it?
Reply
ack154 said 4:32PM on 11-03-2009
The iPhone's INCREASE was 5.71%. Not it's share... that is how much it went up.
Jordan said 4:40PM on 11-03-2009
Then these numbers mean nothing. The number of user changes made is so significantly small that they represent it as a 2.73% increase. An increase of 2.73%, when you only have a 5% share to begin with, is so infinitesimally small. A drop of .25% when you have 92.54% market share, however, is somewhat large. This leads one to believe that Windows lost some market share, Mac gained some, but not near as many as Windows lost did Mac gain. Where did they go? Linux.
The problem with these numbers is they are giving you the share percentage and the increase or decrease percentage. They are not giving you the original share percentages. Why? Because they didn't change much.
dagaz said 3:13AM on 11-04-2009
I actually like the fact that I use a minority OS and as long as only one hardware manufacturer can legally sell computers to run that OS I expect it will stay that way for a long time to come.
Joanna D said 4:30PM on 11-03-2009
Wow, yet another mud slinging article. Windows 7 was available for all of eight days of this survey, give it a chance.
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Chris said 4:54PM on 11-03-2009
How is this mudslinging? I could understand if the article said "windows browsing share only goes up .01 percent after Windows 7 launch" that you would say give it a chance, but they are simply pointing out an factual oddity. That after the launch of a major OS, it's browsing share goes down and another OS's goes up? I don't believe that these numbers really mean anything, but it is wierd, and by no means bashing an OS in its early stages.
Darren said 4:46PM on 11-03-2009
It's not strange. People are not migrating from Mac to Windows, regardless of the "newness" of Windows 7.
All Windows 7 can do is try to prevent losing more Windows users to other platforms. However, because Windows 7 is a clean break from XP it actually opens a door to allow Windows users to leave the platform altogether. If anything, I'd expect more users to migrate to Mac, at least in the short term.
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Jordan said 4:48PM on 11-03-2009
Well then it's a good thing Vista was a clean break from XP 3 years ago. Phew, glad Microsoft avoided losing their entire market share back then.
Joanna D said 4:50PM on 11-03-2009
The main alternatives to Windows 7 are worse than Windows 7. I think that should be enough to stop people going anywhere.
Drifter71 said 4:53PM on 11-03-2009
@Joanna
Why keep trolling here? You claim to be a Mac user but say that the alternatives to Windows 7 are worse.
Buy a PC, send me your mac products and stop trolling here.
Darren said 5:00PM on 11-03-2009
@Jordan
Vista wasn't a clean break from XP, and that's part of the reason Vista was so far behind schedule and of such poor quality.
Jordan said 5:05PM on 11-03-2009
@Darren:
So then you think Vista was more like XP than it is 7?
Gav said 5:08PM on 11-03-2009
@Darren
What on earth are you talking about? Vista was a significant upgrade from XP, which is part of the reason there were so many driver issues. Windows 7 is a far smoother transition from Vista than Vista was from XP.
Darren said 5:08PM on 11-03-2009
Jordan, Windows 7 is much less compatible with XP than Vista was. That's why they added "Classic" mode to run XP apps in a virtual machine.
Jordan said 5:12PM on 11-03-2009
You are right it does have XP Mode, BUT the reason they included that is because they want to get all the business to switch over to 7 that didn't switch over to Vista. The reason these business' didn't switch is because many applications wouldn't work in Vista. The same would hold true to 7 if they didn't have XP Mode. XP Mode only exists because of that reason. It's like when OSX used to have classic mode.
7 uses Vista drivers. This was another reason Vista wasn't too compatible with XP machines, at first. The drivers didn't exist. Now that Vista drivers have been created for all the hardware pieces that were in XP machines, 7 will run perfectly fine on those machines.
You, my friend, are very very wrong. 7 is more like Vista than it is XP. Microsoft probably could have created an upgrade installer from XP to 7, but my guess is they chose not to for reasons like the ones I mentioned.
Darren said 5:12PM on 11-03-2009
Gav, the problem is that there are a ton of Windows users who are still running XP, and the poor quality of Vista makes them that much more suspicious about upgrading even though XP is an absolute antique compared to the state of the art on both Mac and PCs.
Darren said 5:15PM on 11-03-2009
Jorden, you need to concentrate more on your reading. No one is saying that Windows 7 is more like XP; to opposite is true.