Windows 8.1 Adoption Grows as Windows XP Falls: Report

While Microsoft's latest Windows 8.1 iteration has been increasing its user base worldwide, the much older and still much used Windows XP version has been following the opposite trend in the market, highlighted in latest statistics for the month of November.

Notably, out of all the major desktop operating systems in the world, including Windows 8, Windows NT, Mac OS X 10.9, Mac OS X 10.10 and Others, Windows 8.1 stands at 12.1 percent in November, which is slightly lower than Windows XP's 13.57 percent, as per the latest report published by Net Applications. Windows 7 however, still dominates the PC OS market by 53.71 percent.

Last month, Windows 8.1 was at 10.92 percent as compared to Windows XP's 17.18 percent. Notably, Windows XP dropped considerably by 17.65 percent whereas Windows 8.1 rose by 9.46 percent from November last year.

However, Windows XP is now likely to fall at a much faster rate given than seen in the recent past, with Microsoft having already ended the OS version's extended support in April this year. Windows Vista, which dropped down by 0.17 percent to 2.65 in November this year as compared to October, will have its extended support finished by April 2017 as per the Microsoft's Lifecycle page.

As for Windows 7, last month's report added that the firm finally stopped selling the consumer version of the Windows 7 to OEMs. This means that supply of consumer machines coming preloaded with Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate will end shortly, and this will greatly affect the OS' market share. Surprisingly, as compared to October's 53.05 percent, Windows 7 saw a growth in November by 3.36 percent.

As for worldwide desktop browser share, Microsoft's Internet Explorer by virtue of being pre-installed on Windows devices racked up 58.94 percent, while Chrome stood at 20.57 percent, Firefox at 13.26 percent, Safari at 5.90 percent, Opera at 0.88 percent, and the rest accounting for less that 0.26 percent.