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As a web developer I’m always keen to keep abreast of where the PC market is at in terms of platforms and browsers. Back in 2003 it seemed that you could trust that most people were using Windows XP and IE6 but these days the market seems a lot more segmented which makes it more important than ever to know which platforms your website is getting significant exposure on.

PC World recently (Jan 4, 2010) published this article on the current state of play with the “web browsing” operating systems. The guts of their article was that mobile platforms are on the rise with 1.3% of the total market share (no surprises there). What was surprising was that there are already more Windows 7 machines on the web (8% total share) than there are Macs (maybe not that surprising if you sitting in an office place which has seen every machine upgraded to this platform) AND that there are more Java Mobile VM clients surfing the web then there are iPhones.

Here’s the break down in terms of OS Market Share:

Microsoft Windows (all flavours): 92.2% (W7: 8%, Vista: 17.9%, XP: 71.5%)
Apple Mac (all flavours): 5.1%
Java Mobile: 0.53%
Apple iPhone: 0.44%

and for good measure, where web browsers are at (according to thecounter)

Internet Explorer 7: 39%
Internet Explorer 6: 29%
Firefox: 18%
Safari: 5%

MIA from this list is Chrome and IE8 which thecounter don’t seem to track! Net Applications have Chrome at 4.63% but I’m yet to find some up to date numbers on IE8.

So, what does this all mean? Well, maybe it shows that things sure haven’t moved that quickly since 2003; XP is still the biggest player in terms of OS platforms and roughly 1 in 3 people still using IE6!!!

Statistics however are always subjective and no matter which ones you look at, their relevance is diminished by your target audience. Despite this, they do still hold some value. For developers like myself who work on many different and varied projects through out the year, it’s important to have a big picture of where things are at and these statistics help us with that. If nothing else, these stats tell us that that old XP box in the corner running IE6 on XP is still a valuable testing platform and it’s not yet time to throw it out… unless you like VMWare