UPDATED 02:08 EDT / JANUARY 03 2017

APPS

Windows 10 adoption climbs, reaching 24.5% of desktop computers

Last September Microsoft announced Windows 10 was installed on more than 400 million devices. The company hasn’t provided an update since then, but the end-of-year stats from NetMarketShare reveal that Windows 10 adoption is still growing steadily, and is now running on almost a quarter of all desktop machines.

That percentage, 24.4 percent to be precise, is up from the 23.7 percent market share it commanded at the end of November and 23 percent last July. That’s quite an impressive feat for an operating system that’s not even two years old, and that should give Microsoft cause for optimism even if it recently admitted it will not hit its goal of having Windows 10 on a billion devices within the first three years of its life.

The most widely used operating system is still Windows 7, however. The older OS commands an overall market share of 48.3 percent, which means it actually gained almost 1.2 percent in the last month. Interestingly, Microsoft’s now-ancient, unsupported Windows XP operating system also gained in the last month, taking a not insignificant 9.1 percent share of the market.

All of the other operating systems tracked by NetMarketShare saw a decline in their market share. Windows 8.1 fell from 8.01 percent in November to 6.9 percent, while Linux usage also declined by 0.1 percent, though NetMarketShare notes that this falls within its margin of error. Operating systems that fall in the “other” section also declined by just over a percentage point to 9.1 percent.

It should be noted that NetMarketShare grabs its data by aggregating traffic from across a wide network of websites it covers, so its figures are not entirely accurate.

There was also welcome news for Microsoft for its new Edge browser’s performance. The browser has struggled to gain much traction since its release in 2015. However, its usage climbed to 5.3 percent by the end of 2016, up from 2.8 percent one year ago. In the same period however, Microsoft’s older Internet Explorer browser saw usage collapse from 46.3 percent at the end of 2015 to just 20.8 percent at the end of 2016. It seems the majority of IE users switched not to Edge but to Google’s Chrome browser, which saw its market share climb from 32.3 percent one year ago to a commanding 56.4 percent at the end of 2016.

Even if NetMarketShare’s browser statistics aren’t entirely accurate, it’s clear that Microsoft seems to have all but lost the browser wars even as its new OS gains in popularity.

Image credit: geralt via pixabay.com

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