Usage share for both Windows and IE sink ever so slowly

In Web usage statistics now expanded to include mobile platforms, Windows is slipping against not just Macintosh and Linux, but also against iPhone, iPod Touch, and Java ME. This according to the latest live statistics from Net Applications, which samples global Web traffic from its clients.

Among visitors to all of Web sites tracked by Net Applications, Windows has dropped nearly 3 full percentage points in under a year, falling from 94.8% to 87.9% between June 2008 and April 2009. Apple's Mac OS rose from 7.94% to 9.73% over the same time frame, while Linux clients broke the one percent hurdle for the first time ever, stepping from 0.80% to 1.02%.

Although still tiny in comparison to those of larger OS, mobile operating environments picked up steam in their shares, too, with levels rising from 0.16% to 0.55% for the iPhone, from 0.04% to 0.15% for the iPod Touch, and from 0.0% to 0.7% for Java ME.

In the latest chapter of the perpetual Web browser wars, Microsoft's IE lost 0.7 of a percentage point in one month alone, ending April with a Web usage share of just 66.1%. At the same time, Mozilla's Firefox grew its share 0.4 of a percentage point to finish April with 22.5% and Google's Chrome added 0.2 of a percentage point to close the month at 2.4%.

Despite big initial interest, Google browser doesn't seem to have progressed all that astoundingly since Chrome first entered beta, particularly given Google's current promotion of Chrome on its industry leading search engine site.

In the early days of September, 2008, Chrome's usage hovered between 0.85% and 1.57%. Still, Chrome's increase in usage since then has been more than enough to help dent IE.

Now as then, Chrome landed in fourth place for April of 2009 behind Apple's Safari browser. While remaining in third place, Safari did fall off ever so slightly by 0.02 of a percentage point between March and April of this year, to 8.2%.

The Netscape browser took fifth place for April, with 0.82%, moving up a bit from 0.69% in March, while Opera took sixth in April, at 0.68%, down scantily from 0.70% in March. All other browsers combined accounted for merely a 0.29% share in April.

Meanwhile, even the recent release of IE8 hasn't helped to raise Microsoft's overall browser share. IE8 did gain 2.2 percentage points in April, spurred along by Microsoft's offer of the new browser to IE7 and IE6 users through Automatic Updates.

Yet IE7 lost 2 points that month, and the increasingly ancient IE6 dropped yet another 0.8 of a percentage point.