Vista/IE market share slide, Win 7/Firefox/Chrome surge

According to data supplied by web metrics firm Net Applications, both Vista and Internet Explorer lost market share during September, while Windows 7, Firefox and Chrome all saw a surge in market share.

Vista saw its market share slide by 0.18%, which might not itself seem significant, but it’s the first time the OS has lost share since January 2008. Its market share is now at 18.6%.

Internet Explorer’s market share also took a battering, dropping by a massive 1.26%, taking its market share to a new low of 65.7%. This is a huge hit for Microsoft.

As for gains, Windows 7 is on the up, with a 1.52% market share, up 0.34%. This means that already, nearly one in every 66 computers browsing the web is running Windows 7. For an operating system that’s not yet out for general release yet, that’s pretty impressive.

Firefox has also seen a surge in its market share, up 0.77% to 23.75%. Same for Chrome, climbing 0.33% to 4.24%.

Interesting trends, be even more interesting to see if they continue.

Net Applications measures OS and browser usage by tracking the computers that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a data pool of about 160 million unique visitors per month.