Jew World Order

Windows XP lost more users to Windows 7 last month, but the decade-old platform continues to hold on to its spot as the most popular operating system. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer also retained its top spot among web browsers.

(Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)

Looking at OS stats for February, Net Applications found that XP’s share of the market dipped to 45 per cent from 47 per cent in January. At the same time, Windows 7 grabbed 38 per cent of all users, up from 36 per cent from the prior month.

The latest numbers show a trend in which XP has gradually lost share over time, while Windows 7 has picked up more customers. In February 2011, XP owned more than half of the market at 57 per cent, while Windows 7 had just a 24 per cent share. Although XP climbed slightly in January, it now seems on the decline once again.

Over the past year, Windows 7 has been winning an extra percentage point or two most months, and has risen steadily each month since its debut more than two years ago. The punching bag of operating systems — Windows Vista — has kept losing more of its audience, now resting with just 8 per cent of the market.

Microsoft continues to convince people to move away from XP towards Windows 7.

The company has reminded consumers and especially companies that support for XP runs out in April 2014, at which time security patches, bug fixes and other updates will no longer be available.

Despite its considerable effort in creating Windows 8, Microsoft has advised businesses still on XP not to wait for the new OS, and instead to migrate to Windows 7 now. The software giant unveiled its new Windows 8 beta, or consumer preview, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC).

The Windows 8 developer preview, which launched in September, accounted for just 0.3 per cent of the market in February, according to Net Applications. It’ll be interesting to see how much of a share the consumer preview is able to carve off for March when the research firm releases its next report.

Meanwhile, for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, stasis is bliss.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer seems to be keeping rival browsers at bay after years of share losses.
(Credit: Net Applications)

In February’s worldwide usage statistics, IE largely held at bay its top challengers — Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome — according to Net Applications’ latest statistics. IE has done so for a few months now, a big improvement for Microsoft compared to previous years of losing share.

IE dipped from 53 per cent of global usage in January to 52.8 per cent in February among desktop browsers; Firefox and Chrome stayed level at 20.9 per cent and 18.9 per cent, respectively. Safari popped up a notch from 4.9 per cent to 5.2 per cent, and Opera was unchanged at 1.7 per cent.

Browsers have become a fiercely competitive technology as companies seek to attract users to what has become a foundation for many applications that they use daily. Underlying operating systems still matter — especially on mobile devices, where apps are a vibrant market — but people spend a lot of time on the web.

Among mobile devices, Android rose to second place over Opera Mini, and Safari extended its first-place lead.
(Credit: Net Applications)

IE lagged behind its rivals for years, but IE9 marked the beginning of a comeback in which Microsoft matched rivals for many features and often outdid them when it came to hardware acceleration.

With the forthcoming IE10, Microsoft boasts about building web technology features before its rivals in the brand new fifth “platform preview” of IE10. Take that with a grain of salt — IE10 isn’t shipping yet, but Microsoft has begun answering the challenge.

Via CNET