In late August 2012, Chitika Insights observed Web traffic from OS X Mountain Lion users constituting more than 10% of all Mac-based Web traffic a month following its release. At that time, Mac developers were dealing with a decidedly fragmented operating system (OS) environment, with users of four separate OS versions each generating around 10% of Mac Web traffic or more. Now nearly seven months later, Chitika Insights examined the current distribution of Web usage from Mac OS X users.
In late August 2012, Chitika Insights observed Web traffic from OS X Mountain Lion users constituting more than 10% of all Mac-based Web traffic a month following its release. At that time, Mac developers were dealing with a decidedly fragmented operating system (OS) environment, with users of four separate OS versions each generating around 10% of Mac Web traffic or more. Now nearly seven months later, Chitika Insights examined the current distribution of Web usage from Mac OS X users.
To quantify this study, Chitika Insights compiled a week’s worth of Mac OS X web traffic, sampling hundreds of millions of desktop ad impressions from March 8th, to March 14th, 2013. The team then calculated market share distribution between all versions of Mas OS X.
Mountain Lion is almost tied with OS X Lion usage at 27% vs. 28% of all Mac OS X traffic, respectively. However, as we saw in our August study, Snow Leopard remains the most popular version of the OS, generating 35% Mac OS X traffic. Based on current trends, and taking into account the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.9 later this year, Lion will likely never be the most used Mac operating system. This creates some problems for developers that need to create software for three different OS versions to reach the widest audience.