Microsoft's most recent hardware offerings may be the talk of the town but things aren't quite as peachy on the software side according to NetMarketShare.
A quick look at the market share analytics firm's desktop web browser trends must be quite alarming if you're Microsoft. Dating back to at least last December, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been ceding users at a steady (and rapid) pace.
Digging in deeper, we see that Internet Explorer held 46.32 percent of the desktop browser market in December 2015. As of this past October, that figure has almost exactly been cut in half, down to just 23.13 percent.
With Microsoft's Edge only gaining a 2.47 percent share over the past year and Firefox and Safari more or less remaining flat, where exactly are all of Internet Explorer's former users going? Over to Google's Chrome browser.
During the same span, Chrome's market share went from 32.33 percent all the way up to 54.99 percent. That's a mighty impressive 70.09 percent uptick. Microsoft's combined market share (Internet Explorer + Edge) sits at 28.39 percent as of October.
It's hard to put actual user figures behind the percentages but Computerworld has taken a stab at it. Using NetMarketShare's data for browser and operating system user share in addition to Microsoft's claim that roughly 1.5 billion PCs worldwide run Windows, the publication estimates that IE and Edge have lost around 331 million users since the beginning of 2016.
As always, keep in mind that these are market share estimates from a single analytics firm so take them with a grain of salt.