Linux breaks through one percent web share

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 May 2009 06:50

Your IT - Home IT

Google's Chrome has consolidated its place as the fourth browser, rising from 1.23 percent in March to 1.42 percent in April.

Curiously, Netscape (or at least browsers masquerading as Netscape) showed an uptick in April - its 0.82 percent share pushing it ahead of Opera (0.68 percent) for the first time in over a year.

The iPhone and iPod touch have also shown strong growth - indeed, both are growing faster than Linux. The iPhone share went from 0.15 to 0.55 percent (a more than threefold gain), while iPod touch rose fivefold from 0.03 to 0.15 percent.

The dark horse is Java ME. Reflecting the growing use of mobile web access, its share has risen from 0.00 percent at the end of 2008 to 0.07 percent in April 2009.

If the breakdown is restricted to mobile platforms, the shares are (to the nearest whole number) iPhone/iPod touch 65 percent, Android 9 percent, Java ME 8 percent, Symbian 7 percent, Windows Mobile 6 percent, BlackBerry 3 percent, others 2 percent.

As always, it must be stressed that Net Applications' figures do not measure market share in the traditional sense of sales in a particular period, or how the installed base is divided between platforms.

Instead, the statistics reflect the systems and browsers being used to access the web sites operated by Net Applications' clients. While it is not appropriate to read much into the absolute figures, the trends revealed do give some insight about changes in patterns of use.