Web study: Windows 98 usage surpasses Windows 95

According to market surveyor StatMarket, which monitors over 25 millionvisitors daily to over 79,000 independently operated Web sites, MicrosoftWindows 98 has surpassed Windows 95 to become the most popular operatingsystem for browsing the Web. Almost 50% of Web users are using Windows 98,while 41.44% are using Windows 95 and 3.04% are using Windows NT. In fact,when you tally all of the Windows operating systems together, they areresponsible for nearly 95% of all Web browsing. The Macintosh came in adistant fourth with 2.47% while WebTV (1.88%), Windows 3.x (1.05%), Linux(0.20%), Sun Solaris/SunOS (0.09%), and OS/2 (0.01%) brought up the rear.

Seeing Windows dominate the usage list isn't unexpected but even StatMarketquestioned the low score for Linux, which has between 8 and 20 millionactive users.

"Linux Online reports that there are 8 million users worldwide, of which41,314 are registered," the report states. "60% of registered computers areused as workstations, while only 27% are used as Web servers. Yet,Linux-based PCs still represent a significant minority when only a fractionof a percent of Internet surfers use it as their operating system."

The big inroads for Linux continue to be in the server market. IDC says thatLinux controls 17% of the server market, compared to 36% for Windows NT. ButLinux server usage more than doubled in 1998, while Windows NT's shareremain steady when compared to the previous year