For the last few months we have been hearing from the Mac press that Apple is taking over the world.

They cited figures, usually from NetApplications indicating that the OSX operating system had been gaining ground. However it appears that any moves away from Windows was only temporary and since Windows 7 entered the market the Mac OS use is slipping.

Figures from NetApplications show that Windows 7 saw healthy growth in web-tracked usage in its first full month of release while Mac OS X is dropping fast. Mac OS X dropped from 5.27 per cent in October to 5.12 per cent in November among operating systems that NetApplications tracked on the web. Not much, but given that NetApplications has been at the forefront of trumpeting the MacOS's rise it is very surprising.

Windows 7's gains appear to be coming at the expense of Windows XP, and not Windows Vista. Month-on-month, Windows XP sank 1.43 per cent to 69.05 while Vista slipped a mere 0.28 per cent to 18.55. True, Vista has not got much of a market share to start with, but those Mac OS users must have done the unthinkable and defected.

Internet Explorer sank to a new low of 63.62 per cent, while Firefox reached a new high of 24.72 per cent. Google's Chrome has doubled its presence over the year from 1.52 per cent presence in January grew handsomely by November to 3.93. And Apple's Safari? It dropped along with Mac OS X in November, down to 4.36 per cent from October's 4.42.