Windows 7 Market Share Still Above 25%

The number of users with Windows 7 has hardly decreased in recent months, despite Microsoft ending support for the operating system on January 14. According to several statistics, the market share is still above 25 percent.

Windows 7 has a market share of 26.86 percent on Netmarketshare, compared to 26.94 percent last month. A decrease of only 0.08 percentage point. Based on statistics from the statistics service, the operating system would still run on more than a quarter of all computers that visit the web, while the end date of Windows 7 support is only a little over a month away. According to figures from Netmarketshare, Windows 7 had a market share of 36.9 percent in December of 2018. This has therefore decreased by about 10 percentage points in the past year.

Globalstats reports similar numbers. On Statcounter, the current market share of Windows 7 is 27.45 percent. A month earlier this was 27.98 percent. This is equivalent to a decrease of 0.53 percentage point. At this time last year, Windows 7’s market share was still 35.55 percent. Analytics tool W3Counter reports that 10 percent of website visitors use Windows 7. These statistics also include all mobile operating systems. These figures are based on web traffic from websites using W3Counter.

The most recent Steam Hardware Survey shows that approximately 18.47 percent of all Steam users are still running Windows 7 64-bit. This is an increase of 2.43 percent compared to October 2019. The 32-bit variant of Windows 7 runs on 0.8 percent of the PCs in the hardware survey. Incidentally, the hardware survey does not include the same users every month, which means that the increase in Windows 7 users is not representative in any case. For example, the number of Windows 10 users decreased by 2 percentage points to 74.23 percent. Users are unlikely to have exchanged Windows 10 for an older OS.

The end of Windows 7 has been around for a long time. In early 2015, Microsoft withdrew mainstream support for the operating system, but promised to release security updates for another five years. In a little over a month, this period will also expire. Microsoft will still offer extended support for Windows 7 to businesses, but will be charged an annual fee per system.