Apple Market Share Continues to Climb, Windows Drops

228w ago - They are not dramatic changes, but they are steady and heartening to the Apple universe of users and developers. The trend continues from December numbers, and for Apple, all the trends are good.

Net Applications, a company that tracks operating system and market share by looking at results from search engines, reports that Apple has a 9.93% share of OS users for January of 2009, up from 9.63% the previous month.

Windows OS market share measured 88.26% in January, dropping slightly from 88.7% in December.

If you add in iPhone users (0.48%) to the Mac OS X data, the Apple market share is 10.41%, which again, is higher that last month.

Browser shares are also an interesting data point. Net Applications says Microsoft's Internet Explorer has the lowest market share since they began tracking browsers in 2005. IE users now comprise 67.6% of the browsers online. In the last 12 months, IE has dropped about 8%.

For the third month in a row, Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome all gained market share at the expense of Microsoft. Safari's share of 8.3% is a record for Apple.

These numbers continue to be good news for Apple, a company trying to buck a nasty recession along with the rest of the industry.