Windows 8 Market Share Finally Overtakes Windows Vista

Windows 8 may be proving divisive, but Microsoft has some reason to celebrate after the market share of its latest operating system exceeded that of Windows Vista for the first time.

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 8 now accounts for 5.1 percent of the market, ahead of Vista’s 4.62 percent.

However it is still a long way behind two of its predecessors, with Windows 7 commanding a 44.27 percent share and Windows XP controlling 37.17 percent, despite Microsoft ending support for windows XP on 7 April 2014. Windows 8 also trails Mac OS X, which has a combined share of 7.2 percent.

Windows 8 market share

Windows 8 was released in October last year, promising to work equally well on both tablets and traditional PCs as Microsoft looked to shore up the sliding PC market and secure a greater presence on touchscreen devices.

Microsoft has sold more than 100 million licenses for the operating system, but it has struggled to win favour with consumers, while there are suggestions that enterprises might reject Windows 8 entirely as they continue with their migrations from Windows XP to Windows 7.

In the browser market, Internet Explorer remains dominant, with a 56.15 percent share of the market, ahead of Firefox’s 19.5 percent and Chrome’s 17.17 percent, however Chrome 27.0 was the second most used version with 13.76 percent.

The most popular version was Internet Explorer 8, with 22.67 percent, with the next most popular editions of Microsoft’s browser being IE10 with 13.25 percent and IE 9 with 11.71 percent.

Interestingly, 6.13 percent of computers were accessing the Internet using Internet Explorer 6, which Microsoft has been looking to kill off due to the number of security threats associated with the browser.

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