Mac OS X web share cracks 8 percent

Stephen Withers
Friday, 03 October 2008 07:38

Opinion and Analysis

The iPhone (and probably the iPod touch, though it's not clear whether Net Applications includes that model) is definitely on the map with a 0.32 percent share in September. For the second month running, the iPhone's web share has been bigger than all the other minor platforms put together. iPhone web usage seems sure to increase as the device goes on sale in more and more countries.

The rest has been spread thinly between the PlayStation (currently 0.03 percent), Wii (0.01 percent) and 'others' (0.21 percent, down from 0.31 percent in the year-ago period but still much higher than the 0.07 percent recorded in October 2006).

Browser share figures make interesting reading, even though it is still a three-horse race if you ignore anything with less than a 1 percent share.

At 71.52 percent, Internet Explorer still has more than three and and half times the share of its closest rival, but it's losing ground fairly steadily.

Firefox has improved its share by almost one-third since September 2007, improving from 14.99 percent to 19.46 percent.

Safari use is also on the up and up, but it has grown slightly less than the Mac's web share, suggesting that there's some leakage to Firefox and other browsers, or that people who have tried the Windows version are turning away from it.

The dark horse is Chrome, the new browser from Google. Released in beta form at the beginning of September, it sparked considerable interest and StatCounter (a rival of Net Applications) reported that Chrome took a one percent web share on the day it was launched.

Net Applications' stats also show that Chrome peaked at over one percent when first launched, but the final figure for the month was 0.78 percent. More than Opera, more than Netscape, more than any other browser outside the big three.

Just watch that figure shoot up once Google offers a version of Chrome that matches the traditional idea of a beta release (feature-complete and no known bugs). Oh, and Mac and Linux versions wouldn't hurt, either, even if they only account for less than 10 percent of web use on Net Applications' figures.

So, at this rate, a 10 percent Mac OS X web share isn't too far away, still massively outgunning Linux and providing an ever growing alternative to Windows. For Apple, it's great news and a vindication of Steve Jobs and his plans over the past few years – and in all likelihood the best is yet to come!