Windows 7 surpasses 50 percent global OS market share

Recent data from analytics company StatCounter shows that Windows 7 has obtained more than half of the worldwide operating system market for the first time. The OS surpassed Windows XP as the most popular choice globally in October 2011 but it wasn’t until last month that it surpassed the 50 percent mark.

According to StatCounter, Windows Vista continues to hold the bronze medal for third place with 8.32 percent market share, although Mac OSX has been making a heavy push to capture this spot as of late, sitting at 7.05 percent at the end of June. If current trends continue, OSX will likely overtake Vista in the coming months.

Of course this is only one company’s interpretation of stats, as Net Applications claims that Windows XP still holds a 43.61 percent share of the market. Their data indicated that XP is still the top dog, just barely edging out Windows 7 at 41.59 percent. Furthermore, Vista still holds a sizeable lead of 3.6 percent market share over OSX.

CNET highlights that despite launching nearly three years ago, Windows 7 has had a slower time achieving the same popularity as Windows XP. The main reason for this is that many businesses are still holding on to XP for dear life after seeing how bad Vista was. XP is generally considered to be stable and custom business applications built for the platform would likely need to be recoded to work on 7.

Microsoft will ending support for Windows XP in April 2014 and is encouraging legacy users to upgrade to Windows 7 ASAP.

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Chrome overtakes Firefox market share for the first time

StatCounter and Net Applications have just released their latest report on global web browser usage and, at least according to the former, Google's three-year-old Chrome browser has already surpassed Firefox in terms of usage. Net Applications still has Firefox ahead by 4 percentage points, but either way the trend is crystal clear and it's just a matter of time before Chrome takes in the second spot behind IE.

StatCounter reports that Chrome took 25.7% of the worldwide market last month, up from just 4.66% two years ago, compared to Firefox’s 25.23 percent. It's a marginal win, but a win nonetheless. Meanwhile, Net Applications says Chrome gained 0.7% in November to 18.2%, while Firefox dropped 0.4 percentage points to 22.1% in the same period. By the latter's estimates, Chrome could outpace Firefox by March 2012.

StatCounter Global Browser Usage

That's a massive achievement for Google in just a little over three years, even more so considering Opera has tried for years with a very capable alternative but currently holds less than 2% market share worldwide.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer maintains a strong lead with somewhere between 40.63% and 52.63% globally, depending on which source you trust the most. Safari holds a mere 5-6% when it comes to desktop browsers, but dominates the mobile space with 55% usage, according to Net Applications latest figures. Also in mobiles, the Android browser had bumped Opera Mini aside in October for the second-place spot, but in November, Opera Mini took some share back. They now hold 20.1% and 16% of that market, respectively.

Net Applications Global Mobile Browser Usage

Mobile browsers still represent a relatively small portion of the market, but with smartphones and tablets use growing exponentially mobile browsing is also on the rise. According to Net Applications' data for November, browser usage on personal computers represented 92% of the market while mobile devices took 6.7%.

Nvidia loses discrete graphics market share, still on top

The first quarter of the year saw some 19.03 million discrete graphics cards shipped worldwide, according to the latest numbers from Jon Peddie Research. This number represents a slight 0.2% increase over the 18.84 million recorded in Q4 2010 but was not enough to beat the year ago period. And though Nvidia remains the leader in unit shipments for the quarter, it actually saw a sequential drop of 2% from Q4, while AMD increased 5.7% during the same period.

In terms of market share, the green team now sits at 59.12%, dropping 1.65 percentage points from 60.77% last quarter and as much as 5.38 points from 64.50% in Q1 2010. Meanwhile, AMD went from 34.65% last year and 38.77% last quarter to 40.46% in Q1 2011. The company's upward trend is fueled by another successful Radeon series, which has been toe to toe with Nvidia's offerings when it comes to performance.

Vendor	Q1 2011 Share	Q4 2010 Share	Qtr-Qtr Growth	Q1 2010 Share	Yr-Yr Growth
AMD	40.46%	38.77%	4.37%	34.65%	16.79%
Nvidia	59.12%	60.77%	-2.71%	64.50%	-8.35%
Others	0.42%	0.47%	-9.99%	0.85%	-50.62%

Note that these numbers only concern discrete graphics card shipments, which is why you don't see Intel listed in the chart above. JPR published results for combined discrete and integrated graphics shipments earlier this month, showing a 10.3% spike in shipments after a weak holiday quarter for the industry.

Intel led the pack controlling 54.4% of the market, well ahead of AMD's 24.8% cut. Nvidia further cemented its third-place position by dropping eight percentage points from the year ago quarter to 20%. The remaining portion was largely represented by Matrox and VIA/3, who had a combined share of 0.75%, while SiS was entirely off the map in Q1 2011.