Statistics provided by Internet metrics company Net Applications confirm several trends in web browser and operating system usage. The Windows 7 operating system is still gaining market share mostly at the expense of its predecessors Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows XP lost another 1.05% of market share accumulating to a total market share loss of 10.21% since June 2009 or 7.07% since October 2009 the month Windows 7 was released. XP’s market share in April 2009 fell to 63.41% which is still the largest share by far.

Windows Vista’s market share is going down as well from 17.58% in June 2009 to 15.60% in April 2010. Windows 7 gained 1.45% of market share in April closing in on Vista with its market share total of 11.68%. It will take approximately another four months before Windows 7 will become the second most used operating system in the world if the current trend continues.

The market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped below 60% for the first time in April 2010 to 59.95%, a trend that is likely to continue in the next months. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will get momentum with the release of Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 8 on the other hand gained some market share but was not able to compensate for the market share drops of Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

The biggest winner is the Google Chrome web browser with an increase of 0.60% in April to a total of 6.73%. This increase was mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer as the other browsers remained fairly stable. Firefox 3.6 saw a huge jump in market share since January 2010 where it started with 1.15%. The browser has now a market share of 15.33% which come mainly at the expense of Firefox 3.5 which lost more than 11% since January.

It is somewhat surprising that Opera did not get any momentum from the browser choice screen in Europe and the release of Opera 10.50. Any thoughts on that? You can click on the images to go directly to the Netmarketshare website.