Linux Market Share Growing Faster than Apple! | Linux adoption rate beats iPhone
I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%
Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…
Along those lines, Internet Explorer is now down below 70% market share, while firefox passed 20%, Safari hangs on to 7.13% of the market from the survey and chrome is showing the most percentage growth up to 0.83% (surpassing Opera’s market share.)
One thing I SHOULD note that will throw a bit more uncertainty into the numbers. Most NON internet explorer browsers support “lying” about the browser user agent and operating system. I can’t count the number of times I’ve HAD to switch my browser identification FROM Firefox on Linux to Internet Explorer on Windows to make a site work. To make life simpler some leave their browser masquerading as Internet Explorer on Windows to avoid similar “browser discrimination”.