Microsoft's market share in web browsers -- which used to be around 90% -- has now slipped below 60%, with Net Applications recording 59.95% for April. And with IE losing 0.7 percentage points over the month, Google's Chrome browser gained almost all of it: 0.6 percentage points. Firefox and Apple's Safari made negligible gains, while Opera actually lost market share.
It wouldn't be sensible to put too much emphasis on Net Applications' monthly numbers, which are based on logging access to lots of websites. They're a good guide to the trends, but the details depend on which sites are monitored. However, in general, Chrome has grown rapidly while other independent alternatives have tended to plateau.
Compared with April last year, Chrome has gained 4.94 points of market share, while Firefox has only gained 0.75 points and Opera 0.26 points. Over the same period, IE has dropped 7.82 points, so Chrome has grabbed almost two-thirds of the share IE has lost.
Google has the huge advantage of advertising its browser on the front of its market-dominating search engine. It's still hard to see any significant change due to the European Commission forcing Microsoft to provide local Windows users with a "browser choice" screen.
When it comes to browser versions, Microsoft's IE8 remains top dog with 27.66% (including compatibility mode). IE8 is followed by IE6 (17.58%), Firefox 3.6 (15.33%) and IE7 (12.5%). IE7 is obviously in decline, but IE8 could hang on for a while because IE9 won't run on Windows XP.
In the operating system market, Net Applications reckons Windows XP leads with 63.41%, followed by Vista (15.60%), Windows 7 (11.68%), Mac OS X 10.6 (2.29%) and 10.5 (2.13%). Windows 7 looks likely to overtake Vista in the next three months, but again, XP won't be overhauled in a hurry.
There are probably around 750,000,000 XP machines still in use. Replacing them at the rate of 150m a year would still take 5 years.
