Mac OS X web share cracks 8 percent

Stephen Withers
Friday, 03 October 2008 07:38

Opinion and Analysis

New figures show Mac OS X's web share continues to grow at the expense of Windows. Linux might be growing more rapidly, but it's still too small to be significant.

For some time now Macs have been growing in popularity with consumers, and this is variously attributed to the hardware styling, the ease of use the operating system, and the much vaunted 'halo effect' of Apple's immensely successful iPods. It's always nice to see statistics that bear this out for all to see.

Such statistics come from Net Applications' Market Share service, which reports on the browsers and operating systems used to access 40,000 web sites attracting some 160 million visitors per month - enough to make it worth taking note of the numbers.

That said, whether the numbers can be extrapolated to the web as a whole is debatable, but if nothing else the trends and month-to-month variations can provide some insight into Mac OS X's growing popularity.

According to Net Application's Market Share reports for September 2008, Mac OS was responsible for 8.23 percent of traffic, up from 7.86 percent in August. A year ago, the figure was 6.63 percent, and back in October 2006 (the oldest data provided by Net Applications) it was only 5.22 percent.

This solid growth rate is coming at the expense of Windows - that operating system's web share has dropped from 94.31 percent in October 2006 to 90.29 percent in September 2008.

Figures for Windows show a continuing migration from XP to Vista, with Vista picking up approximately on percentage point each month since its release in early 2007.

Three-quarters of Windows' overall decline has been transferred to the Mac. What about the other one percent?

Half of it has gone to Linux, up from 0.39 percent in October 2006 to 0.91 percent last month. It is very interesting to see that - at least according to Net Application's stats - Linux hasn't yet managed to scrape into single figures.

What about Apple's other web capable devices? Please read on.