January 1st 2019 / still 4%

[caliber]

DX12 ???  https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263422/microsoft-directx-12-windows-7-world-of-warcraft-support

 

[Mathwiz]

12 hours ago, antiproton said:

Well, we all saw what happened with Windows 8. The start menu disappeared altogether.

To me, the Win 8 "Metro" UI reminded me way too much of the old Windows 3.1 Program Mangler, except updated with animations. I also didn't care too much for its "tiled" appearance - that reminded me of Windows 2!

M$ actually could have gone "back to the future" with an improved PM. Back in the day, Symantec did it with their Norton Desktop, giving Win 3.1 an almost Mac-like appearance. But in this day and age where everyone makes copyright and patent claims on the most trivial grounds imaginable* I suppose M$ didn't want the legal exposure. So they ended up with Metro. Yuck.

*AIUI Apple actually sued a company selling a Windows-like UI for PCs called Gem Desktop, because it had a "Trash Can" just like the Mac! Which is why Windows has a "Recycle Bin" instead - or at least, so I've heard.

[vwestlife]

6 hours ago, Mathwiz said:

AIUI Apple actually sued a company selling a Windows-like UI for PCs called Gem Desktop, because it had a "Trash Can" just like the Mac! Which is why Windows has a "Recycle Bin" instead - or at least, so I've heard.

Apple actually sued Microsoft, claiming that Windows' look and feel was too similar to Mac OS. The case got dismissed on the grounds that they both copied the Xerox PARC graphical user interface. Apple also sued HP over their NewWave GUI and they lost all claims except that NewWave's trash can and folder icons were too similar to Mac OS. That case didn't have anything to do with Windows, but Microsoft probably took it as a warning to avoid using a trash can icon in Windows 95.

Apple's lawsuit against Digital Research over GEM never went to trial, because DR was fearful of a prolonged legal battle they couldn't afford, so they changed GEM to be much less Mac-like, except in the version used in Atari ST computers.

 

[win32]

Some interesting data out of Armenia. I wonder how this happened:

https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/armenia/#monthly-201708-201907

Probably subject to a high margin of error with anomalies like the ~7% bump for Vista and 8 earlier in the period, but the trend is clear; Windows 7 users are switching back.

Edited August 14, 2019 by win32

[TrevMUN]

*checks that statcounter*

44.6%?! From 4% in December according to OP?!

As much as I find that hilarious, something's got to be off about those numbers ... What's their methodology for this data? Or their sample audience?

Oh! I see now, those are the numbers for Armenia.

I tried checking OP's source and compared it to this. XP's market share is 2.99% according to Netmarketshare. I assume that's global numbers ... It does, however, seem that there has been a dip in Windows 7 usage worldwide, assuming those numbers are global. Overall the market shift was in 10's favor, though.

Edited August 16, 2019 by TrevMUN
Found new information.

[Mathwiz]

I suspect that a lot of Win 7 users are either upgrading to Win 10, switching to new Win 10 machines, or just abandoning Windows altogether. That's probably due to all the hype M$ is pushing as Win 7 EOS nears.

Win 7 users abandoning Windows would push up the percentages of all other Windows versions. That may explain the apparent rise in Win XP users. To confirm whether the apparent rise in XP use is real, you'd need to see the raw numbers, not just percentages.

[caliber]

as of today, 1.16% only... below Linux

https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?options={"filter"%3A{"%24and"%3A[{"deviceType"%3A{"%24in"%3A["Desktop%2Flaptop"]}}]}%2C"dateLabel"%3A"Custom"%2C"attributes"%3A"share"%2C"group"%3A"platformVersion"%2C"sort"%3A{"share"%3A-1}%2C"id"%3A"platformsDesktopVersions"%2C"dateInterval"%3A"Monthly"%2C"dateStart"%3A"2019-12"%2C"dateEnd"%3A"2019-12"%2C"segments"%3A"-1000"}

[Jody Thornton]

49 minutes ago, caliber said:

as of today, 1.16% only... below Linux

https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?options={"filter"%3A{"%24and"%3A[{"deviceType"%3A{"%24in"%3A["Desktop%2Flaptop"]}}]}%2C"dateLabel"%3A"Custom"%2C"attributes"%3A"share"%2C"group"%3A"platformVersion"%2C"sort"%3A{"share"%3A-1}%2C"id"%3A"platformsDesktopVersions"%2C"dateInterval"%3A"Monthly"%2C"dateStart"%3A"2019-12"%2C"dateEnd"%3A"2019-12"%2C"segments"%3A"-1000"}

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I have a hard time believing that the user base remaining is that low.

 

[win32]

I now see it at 2.25%, so we're above Linux and Mac OS 10.13! The numbers in the table seem to update constantly, and show Windows 7 at 33.1% when the December share is stated as 26.6%. I'd like to say that business PCs are considerably more likely to have Windows XP and 7 than home PCs, but it's New Year's Day. I wouldn't think that many people are working today.

[caliber]

4 minutes ago, win32 said:

I now see it at 2.25%, so we're above Linux and Mac OS 10.13!

I set it to - monthly 2019-12 to 2019-12 - and I get 1.16%

Edited January 1, 2020 by caliber

[dencorso]

[siria]

Jody Thornton said:
> I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I have a hard time believing that the user base remaining is that low.

I believe it's mainly due to fake UserAgent strings.
When websites start boycotting certain old systems or browser versions, first with nags and then kicking visitors out completely, when more and more sites are getting hostile, users are just forced to fake their browser strings.
And miraculously most websites start working again, fully or almost, without any "support" necessary...
Same effect as for Win98 in the past.
And a second dilemma, when statistics drop below a certain low level, it becomes an increasing privacy/fingerprinting risk to belong to such a tiny minority.

[caliber]

January 14th is over.

right after XP EOL there was less XP users (19.24%) than W7 users by now... (26.79%)

I don't know why W10 market share number in this site differs from the other site.

https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201404-201404-bar

 

[FranceBB]

On 1/1/2020 at 7:45 PM, dencorso said:

That's the saddest slope I've ever looked at...

 

On 1/1/2020 at 7:45 PM, siria said:

Jody Thornton said:
> I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I have a hard time believing that the user base remaining is that low.

I believe it's mainly due to fake UserAgent strings.
When websites start boycotting certain old systems or browser versions, first with nags and then kicking visitors out completely, when more and more sites are getting hostile, users are just forced to fake their browser strings.
And miraculously most websites start working again, fully or almost, without any "support" necessary...
Same effect as for Win98 in the past.
And a second dilemma, when statistics drop below a certain low level, it becomes an increasing privacy/fingerprinting risk to belong to such a tiny minority.

That's right. I'm one of those people faking my user agent, however I only bump the number of the version of Chrome to match the very latest release and many websites are happy with that. Most of the times there's no need to also change the OS. The last thing I want is to increase the share number of the bloody Windows 10! Besides I like the idea of people spitting out coffee when they check their website stats and they see "Windows XP x86 - Chrome 80".

[dencorso]

My personal estimates, just to put numbers to things, and using MS own number of 10 users (= 900 million, obtained by telemetry) as a starting point, we should have some 450 million 7 users and (by reading the slope of my regression line above) some 5 million (but maybe twice that, thanks to intense version spoofing) XP users today. Refs.: Netmarketshare,  https://www.askwoody.com/2020/win10-market-share-up-a-bit-win7-down-a-smidgen-and-the-browsers-havent-changed-much-at-all/ and  https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-versus-windows-7-whose-numbers-do-you-trust/, FTW. One must remember that market share numbers are terribly noisy, undersampled and distorted by spoofing, so it's much easier to mesure the ratio of 10 to 7 users (the two desktop leaders) than the absolute percentage of XP users, because the latter is about the same size (if not smaller) than the average random noise associated with the available measurements (and, hence, it's no wonder at all that the 3 sources reported by Ed Bott mostly agree on the former but not the latter).