Windows 10 overtakes Windows 7 as most popular OS in the world, says Net Applications

The new year has brought some good news for Microsoft. According to the latest data from Net Applications (via The Verge), Windows 10 has surpassed Windows 7 as the most popular operating system in the world.

Currently, Windows 10 holds 39.2 percent of the desktop OS market share, which tops Windows 7's 36.9 percent share. This marks the first time Windows 10 has overtaken the nearly 10-year-old Windows 7, which has remained quite popular even through the releases of Windows 8 and Windows 10.

The news of Windows 10's rise comes at the end of a year in which Microsoft revealed the OS is now on more than 700 million active devices. That's well short of the 1 billion threshold Microsoft was hoping to have reached by this point when it originally launched Windows 10, but it's up from 500 million active devices the company said it had achieved in 2017.

As for Windows 7, mainstream support for the aging OS ended in 2015, and extended support is set to come to a close in 2020.