The worldwide marketshare of Windows on the desktop has dropped below 90% for the first time in a long time, according to research company Net Applications. For 6 months in a row Microsoft's operating systems saw a decline in market share. Last month the share of Windows computers dropped another 1.2%, which means currently 89.2% of all computers connecting to the internet are on a Windows OS.
Also Linux saw its market share slightly decrease, it lost 0.2% bringing the total market share of computers connecting to the web running Linux to 1.56%. Where both Windows and Linux lost some of their market share, Mac OS X won. Apple's operating system saw its market share grow with 1.4% bringing the total computers running the OS to 9.2%.
The drop in market share of Windows is mainly due to lower numbers of computers running Windows 7 and Windows XP. The latter reported a market share of less than 10% for the first time in years but still powers 9.7% of all computers. Windows 7 saw its market share go below the 50% for the first time in years, last month there were 3.1% less computers powered by the OS bringing the total to 48.8%. Windows 10 saw an increase of only 0.2% last month.
According to some experts the increasing market share of OS X also means the platform will become a more interesting target for cybercriminals. Despite the larger number of computers running the OS, the amount of malware available for the OS is still relative small. F-Secure recently reported that for OS X only 115 new malware samples were discovered.
