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Mac Gains Internet Browsing Market Share at Expense of Microsoft

Mac Gains Internet Browsing Market Share at Expense of Microsoft

by , 4:50 PM EDT, April 2nd, 2008

Over the last year, the percentage of people using a Mac to access the Internet has risen from about 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent while the Windows market share has dropped by the same amount, according to Net Applications on Wednesday. The iPhone has passed all other OSes except Linux and has gained fourth place in data accumulated up through March 2008.

Internet browsing market share numbers were as follows:

  • Windows - 91.6%
  • Macintosh - 7.48%
  • Linux - 0.61%
  • iPhone - 0.15%
  • Playstation - 0.04%
  • SunOS/Solaris - 0.01%

All other OSes and and the Nintendo Wii failed to register as much as 0.01 percent. The Macintosh market share gains came at the expense of Microsoft, shown in the chart below.


Source: Net Applications

Observer Comments

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Close Name:gslusher Posts: 2088 Joined: 13 Nov 2002
Subject: Once again ...

I need to point out that Net Applications tracks only those sites that they are PAID to track. That will hardly be a representative cross-section of Internet usage. It's very likely skewed toward business-oriented sites and may or may not even include big sites like Amazon or Google, as they are likely to do their own tracking. Thus, it does NOT really represent "Internet browsing market share" except in a quite limited sense. At least, now, this is not being interpreted as "Mac market share," as such announcements used to be labeled.

Given that, the INCREASE in Mac "share" is encouraging.

One nit: the title is pretty much a tautology. If Mac browsing market share is increasing, perforce, the Windows share must decrease, as 1) the total "share" is fixed and 2) the not-Mac-nor-Windows share is very small (less than 1%).

Close Name:Guest
Subject:

I remember when my bank started offering online banking services two years ago. They only offered it for Windows, citing various "paid for" tracking survey places that said macs only made up 3%-5% of internet traffic. Well, they got a lot of complaints, lost a lot of customers, and when they finally allowed Macs access to their online services, turned out to be roughly 40% of their internet business.

So much for the reliability of these paid-for tracking surveys.

Close Name:rezonate Posts: 741 Joined: 04 Feb 2005
Subject: Is the pie growing?

Perhaps Apple is making gains on M$ as a percentage of users. But I'd like to see the correlating data that shows whether total numbers of M$ users are down. If both groups are growing, it may not really be "at the expense of". Per capita is just one metric.

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