From its official launch in October 2009, it took Windows 7 only nine months to pass Vista. Now the next question is when it will catch up with Windows XP. Because, unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP still has a massive 55% of the desktop OS market. That is more than Windows 7 and Vista combined.

To figure out when Windows 7 will overtake XP, we have made a prediction based on the average market share changes over the past six months. It will give us an idea of what will happen if things continue at their current pace.

Predicting future Windows market share

Please note that everything past August 2010 in the below graph is an estimate. The data until today is actual global market share data from Statcounter. We have marked the dates when Windows 7 caught up with Windows Vista, and when it will catch up with Windows XP if the current trend continues.

Observations, based on the current rates of change:

• Windows 7 will overtake XP by the end of 2011.
• Windows Vista may die out sooner than Windows XP, in spite of being a much younger OS.

Other factors to consider

We based our prediction on past market share data, but that is of course a simplified view of something that depends on a number of factors, many of which change over time.

One major factor that may speed up the adoption of Windows 7 and the decline of Windows XP is Microsoft itself. The company is actively discouraging the use of XP and is trying to speed up its demise. We suspect these efforts will escalate the longer XP is able to hang on to a large share of the market.

Something else to take into account is that corporate users tend to wait at least a year before they migrate to a new OS, so we may see a speed-up in Windows 7 adoption late in 2010 or early 2011 as the corporations start to jump aboard. Since many of them will be migrating from XP, not Vista, this may speed up the decline of XP even further.

The current situation vs. the future

For the curious, here are the current desktop OS market shares for the different Windows versions:

• Windows XP, 55.6%
• Windows Vista, 17.8%
• Windows 7, 19.1%

We were right about when Windows 7 would overtake Vista, but that was a much easier thing to predict. If the above prediction holds true, however, Windows 7 will become the dominant version of Windows roughly two years after its launch. Perhaps it’s finally time for XP to retire?

Market share data source: StatCounter (only the historical data, not the prediction).

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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