Apple hit new highs for market share of the web in July, Net Applications found on Monday. The Mac saw a sharp uptick and hit 5.59 percent of OS traffic online. iOS saw its own boost and reached 2.98 percent, almost triple what it had a year ago.
Almost all of the advances came at Microsoft’s expense. Windows once again reached a new low at 87.66 percent of online traffic. JavaME and Linux both remained stagnant, while Android was still too small to register.
Microsoft did have some consolation in rapid adoption of Internet Explorer 9. Nearly a quarter of Windows users in the US, 24.78 percent, were using the modern browser. The growth was enough for Microsoft to see a rare increase in Internet Explorer’s share on Windows, up to 54.8 percent.
Internet Explorer was still down as a whole, hitting a new low of 52.81 percent. The shift suggested that IE usage was down primarily through Mac adoption boosting rival browsers. Chrome and Safari were the fastest-rising browsers, reaching 13.45 percent and 8.05 percent respectively. Firefox and Opera faced the most declines.
Apple’s gains may have been helped by the simultaneous releases of the new MacBook Air and Lion, which had more new Macs and Mac users active than usual. iOS use would have been helped by recent iPad and Phone adoption spikes during the spring. Microsoft’s browser gain on Windows may have been helped by its dropping Windows XP support for the new software. By limiting IE9 to Vista and 7, Microsoft could modernize its code and get a more competitive release than if it followed its typical insistence on legacy support.
