Vista taking a nibble out of Apple in OS wars?

Computerworld - Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month, while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months, according to statistics released today by market research firm Net Applications.

By the end of March, Vista was used by 2.04% of computers connected to the Internet, according to the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company. That's up from 0.93% of PCs in February.

Now ranked the fifth-most popular operating system by Net Applications, Vista jumped ahead of Windows 98, which had a 1.36% share. Vista still trailed its seven-year-old ancestor, Windows 2000, which had 4.71% share in March.

The share of PowerPC-based Macs fell, though, from 4.29% in February to 3.94% in March. That dip was not fully offset by an increase in Intel-based Mac hardware, leading to a overall net decline in Mac share of 0.3%, to 6.08% in March.

Net Applications collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites.

Vista has now been available to consumers for two months -- and to businesses for four months. Microsoft said last week that it had sold more than 20 million licenses of Vista, eclipsing the 17 million licenses for XP it had sold in its first two months of general release.

Some analysts have predicted that despite Microsoft's plans to spend half a billion dollars marketing Vista, conversions from XP won't be the norm until 2009.

Net Applications also released statistics that showed Internet Explorer's share continuing to lose ground to Firefox, though it remains in no danger of being eclipsed soon. IE had a 78.57% share in March, down from 79.09% in February. Firefox gained nearly a whole percentage point, going from 14.18% to 15.10%.

Apple Inc.'s Safari browser, which runs only on Macs, fell slightly, from 4.85% to 4.51%. Opera ranked 4th with 0.80% while Netscape fell again, to 0.70%.

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