In July, Windows 8 passed Windows Vista in market share. In August, it passed every single version of Apple's OS X combined. Internet Explorer 10 grew sharply, too, as almost one in five Internet users now use the latest version of Microsoft's browser.

Windows 8 made substantial gains in August, picking up 2.01 points of share. This is 37 percent growth on July's figure. Windows XP also fell substantially, losing 3.53 points. With luck, this might mean that Windows XP is finally on the way out. It has less than a year until it stops receiving free security patches from Microsoft; once this happens, it will essentially be in a state of permanent zero day exploits. Even this level of decline isn't enough to see the operating system eradicated in time for its end of life. That's good news for spammers, who'll have plenty of zombie machines to recruit into botnets. It's bad news for everyone else.

Among desktop browsers, Internet Explorer was up 0.99 points, Firefox was up 0.59 points, and Safari was up 0.17 points. Chrome, however, was down significantly, losing 1.76 points. This means that, yet again, Chrome has closed in on Firefox, almost passing it, only to fall back.

Internet Explorer 10's growth slowed down in July but picked back up in August. It's still behind Internet Explorer 8 in total users, but it's closing fast. For Web developers, this can only be a good thing. Less good is the stubborn 6.32 percent of Web users who, for one reason or another, stick with Internet Explorer 6. The one-in-five Web users who use Internet Explorer 8 aren't much better.

This is a problem for everyone. The rapid release browsers—Firefox and Chrome—have the same issue to some extent. Even in spite of automatic, mostly transparent updates, there's a hard core of users who stick with old, unsupported, obsolete versions of the browsers. Mozilla has tried to cater to enterprises that have a legitimate need to stay on one version of a browser for an extended time with its Extended Support Releases. Both Firefox 10 and Firefox 17 received security updates for the better part of a year.

Microsoft has the same problem but on a far greater scale. Pushing out Internet Explorer 10 as an automatic update was clearly a step in the right direction, but this does nothing for anyone on Windows XP or Windows Vista, either in terms of updating their browsers or their operating systems. Clearly, the company has to do something to get these people moving, but thus far, it has been far from proactive about the issue.

Chrome is now really starting to pick up as a mobile browser. It picked up 1.16 points in August. Though it's still far behind the old Android browser, which gained 1.64 points last month, it shows that the install base of Android 4.x devices is on the rise even as Android 2.x remains abundant.