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Windows 8 continues to crawl up the OS food chain

The latest flavor of Windows scored 5.4 percent of all Web traffic seen by Net Applications in July, up slightly from 5.1 in June.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
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Lance Whitney
Net Applications

Windows 8 keeps fighting to gain a larger chunk of the desktop OS market.

The latest stats from market tracker Net Applications show Windows 8 with a 5.4 percent slice of all desktop OS Web traffic in July. That was but a slight bounce from the 5.1 percent share in June when Windows 8 finally surpassed Windows Vista for the hearts and minds of Windows users.

Windows 7 remains the dominant desktop OS with 44.5 percent of Web traffic in July. Windows XP's share was virtually unchanged from the preceding month at 37 percent. XP has slowly been losing its once-dominant grip on the market, but it's been in no rush to retire. In July of 2012, XP held a 42 percent share, according to Net Applications.

Windows 8.1, which arrived as a preview edition in late June, popped up on the ranks with a 0.02 percent share.

Overall, Windows continued to carve out the lion's share of the desktop OS market in July with 91.5 percent. The Mac OS came in second with 7.1 percent, followed by Linux with 1.2 percent.