Windows 8.1 says ‘Hasta la Vista baby!’ to old OS

Windows 8.1 is growing in popularity, passing Windows Vista for the first time since Microsoft launched its revamped version in October last month.

Representing the third full month of Redmond’s latest operating system version, Net Applications’ data reports a rise in market share of 0.35% for Windows 8.1, to 3.95%.

The rise, albeit slight, means the OS passes the market share of Windows Vista, which fell 0.31% to a 3.30% market share. In truth, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 barely made progress in January 2014, gaining a combined 0.09 percentage points (from 10.49% to 10.58%).

Meanwhile, Windows 7 dipped 0.03 percentage points (from 47.52% to 47.49%).

Capturing data from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients, Net Applications reported a 90.72% Windows market share for Microsoft, followed by Mac and Linux at 7.68% and 1.6% respectively.