Windows XP still on 27 percent of computers despite impending support cut-off

Windows XP still accounts for more than 27 percent of computers accessing the internet, according to the latest figures from web analytics firm Net Applications. The figures also show that Windows 8 adoption is still growing slowly, but it has already passed Apple's OS X platform.

The March 2014 statistics gathered by Net Applications identify the range of operating systems being used to browse the web, and the desktop figures show that Windows XP accounted for 27.69 percent of all activity in March.

This is despite the increasingly strident warnings from Microsoft and others that all support for the ageing platform will end on 8 April, and that users may be vulnerable to malware attacks from that date. Mainstream support for XP actually ended in 2009, and Microsoft has only been supplying security bug fixes for the platform since then.

Windows 7 comfortably accounts for the lion's share of the desktop market, and continues to grow incrementally, now making up nearly half of the market at 48.77 percent.

Meanwhile, the figures from Net Applications show that Microsoft's latest operating system continues to grow, albeit slowly. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 together now account for 11.3 percent of computers accessing the web, about 18 months after the first release of the platform.

Rather puzzlingly, this breaks down into Windows 8.1 having a 4.89 percent share while the older Windows 8 still has a 6.41 percent share. Windows 8.1, which was released in October 2013, is a free upgrade for anyone running Windows 8, and offers numerous improvements over the older version.

However, Microsoft can take comfort in the fact that Windows 8 and 8.1 together account for a larger share of the market than all of Apple's OS X versions combined, according to the figures from Net Applications. Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks is the most deployed version at 3.75 percent, followed by OS X 10.6, 10.8 and 10.7, which all have a share of just over one percent apiece.

:story: V3.co.uk