Windows 7 has been a huge success for Microsoft, but its sales and usage had not been enough to stop Windows from slowly losing usage market share to Mac OS. That is, until February 2010, when Windows overall had a gain in market share.

NetMarketShare.com from NetApplications.com provides global usage market share statistics for browsers, operating systems and search engines. This data offers valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage.

As previously reported, Windows 7, released in October 2009, has been the fastest selling operating system in history. It hit the ground running with a large number of people in Microsoft’s test program, and had over 2% usage market share at launch. Win7 peaked above 5% within a month, and peaked above 10% in just over 3 months.

But, for Windows to gain usage share against both Mac OS and Linux is a rare occurrence over the last few years. The question is whether this is an exception, or if a new trend is beginning. And, if Windows continues to gain usage share, what will Apple do to combat the new trend?

Net Market Share from Net Applications provides global usage market share statistics for browsers, operating systems and search engines. This data offers valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage.

Below we will examine browser usage for the past year, and the significant events of the past year to affect usage market share. Data included spans from December 2008 to December 2009.

From December 2008 to December 2009, the overall changes in the top 5 browser usage market share percentages were as follows:

The most significant trends of 2009:

• The gradual erosion of usage share by Internet Explorer to all of its major rivals continued even with a major new version upgrade to IE8.

For many years, IE had no browser competition at all, as the primary battle for users was seen to be at the desktop operating system level between Windows, Mac OS and various flavors of Unix and later Linux. This left little motivation for Microsoft to innovate IE until Internet usage grew, and became the primary reason people were using their computers. Competition did arise on several fronts, and Firefox started to push IE with significant gains in market share. Several versions of IE came out that were in essence trying to keep up with the innovations of other browsers, and Microsoft seemed content to slowly lose share as long as IE was still the market leader. But with the release of IE8 in 2009, Microsoft thought it had the features that would stop or even reverse IE’s slide in share. But, with the addition of Google’s Chrome to the arena, browser share is becoming more and more fought over. Unfortunately for Microsoft, IE’s slide in share did continue through 2009. Yet, IE still holds 62.69% usage market share – almost double the share of all of its competitors combined.

• Google Chrome bursts onto the browser battlefield.

Google ‘accidentally’ let the cat out of the Chrome bag before it was truly ready for release, and didn’t put any marketing into Chrome early on. But, the second half of 2009 saw Chrome nearly double its usage share, and as of the end of the year, it is now the third most used browser in the world behind IE and Firefox. Chrome showed up in ads on Google’s search page, which almost never happens. Google also announced the ongoing development of Chrome OS to up the battle with Microsoft and Apple. Chrome’s 4.63% usage share still pales to even number 2 Firefox’s 24.61% share. But now Firefox can no longer just look ahead at IE and work on closing the gap with the market leader. They also have to look behind them at Chrome, and figure out how to hold off a worthy challenger looking to take share from them.

• Opera pushes the European Union to sue Microsoft to change the way they offer browsers to users with the release of Windows 7.

This was a long, drawn out battle with extremely high stakes. The end result is that European users of Windows 7 will be offered a choice of browsers to install instead of having IE pre-installed and set as the default browser. What this means to future browser usage market share in Europe is unknown now, but the bet here is it will be significantly different than it would have been otherwise. Net Market Share will of course be monitoring this.

• Safari continued its gains in usage share throughout 2009.

Safari usage is typically indicative of the operating system battle between Windows and Mac OS. That is until the release of Windows 7. Since then, both Windows and Mac OS share have held fairly steady. Microsoft scored a huge win with outstanding reviews of Windows 7, and in stopping the market share losses to Apple on the desktop and laptop. So how is Safari still gaining in usage with steady operating system share? Enter the iPhone and an explosion of mobile browsing!

• An explosion in mobile browsing.

As reported at the beginning of 2010 by netmarketshare.com, mobile browsing usage share exploded in December 2009. Mobile browsing now accounts for 1.3% of all browsing. The biggest usage share winners this holiday season were mobile devices. Both Windows and Mac devices lost a small amount of share in December, while all major mobile operating systems attained large percentage gains:

The open questions for 2010 include:

• Will IE finally rebound?
• Will Firefox continue to gain on IE?
• Will Chrome’s gains come primarily from IE, Firefox or both?
• Will European browser usage be significantly different from previous years?
• How fast will mobile browsing grow, and who will dominate those devices?

Firefox from Mozilla turned 5 this month, and celebrated by having achieved 25% of the global browser usage market share. NetMarketShare.com from Net Applications tracks global and local usage market share for browsers, operating systems, search engines and mobile systems.

“What an exciting milestone for Mozilla, particularly as we are celebrating five years of Firefox this week,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla. “The momentum around Firefox adoption has been truly astounding.”

When Firefox entered the browser wars, we at Net Applications always asserted it needed to achieve 10% usage market share to be considered a true competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mozilla crossed that threshold back in March of 2006 and they have grown their usage share fairly steadily since then. Now 1 in 4 people globally are browsing the Internet with Firefox.

That’s impressive, especially when you consider the advantages the other browser providers have enjoyed over the years:

• Internet Explorer has been the default browser on Windows systems, and often the only browser supported by many company’s IT departments
• Safari has been the default browser on Macs and iPhones
• Opera has often been first to introduce new browser features, and has supported many mobile and gaming devices
• Chrome comes from Mozilla’s primary source of revenue, Google, and has performance advantages over other browsers

The competition has been heated, but Mozilla has focused on a formula of:

• Free (this may seem obvious now, but there had to be a difficult decision made between charging for the browser as Opera was doing early on, or come up with another revenue model)
• Open source
• Extensibility
• Excellent user experience
• Frequent updates and innovation

That formula has been successful so far, but the war is far from decided. Microsoft’s release of Windows 7 has seen a very impressive early adoption rate. There are 2 major decisions computer users will face with a major new operating system available. First, do they upgrade to Windows 7, or is this the time to consider an alternative such as a Mac OS or Linux based system. New Mac users will most likely lead to new Safari users. Second, with a new operating system many people will have to decide on a default browser again. This gives IE a great opportunity to win back some of its lost market share. But, it also gives Chrome, Opera and other browsers an opportunity to become the alternative browser of choice over Firefox.

Another major force in the browser wars is the move to mobile. The iPhone has proven that people will browse from their mobile device if the browser and device can provide a similar user experience to a computer. Mobile browsing is projected to grow substantially in the years to come, so this may be the next big battle ground for browser providers.

See current usage market share and trends at NetMarketShare.com.