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Windows Communications Government Microsoft Operating Systems Software The Internet United States Technology

Windows 10 Visits To US Government Sites Surpass Windows 7 For the First Time (onmsft.com) 111

In what may be a signal of changing attitudes for Windows 10, visits to U.S. government sites via Windows 10 have surpassed Windows 7 for the first time. On MSFT reports: This United States government website reports that of the 2.54 billion visits to U.S. Government websites over the past 90 days, 20.9% came from Windows 10, and 20.7% from Windows 7. Interestingly, Windows 8.1 came in at 2.7%, Windows 8 .05%, and other OS 0.8%. The numbers are a bit niche and could be just from a holiday bump based on the sites 90-day average, but they still do give a solid number comparison for the state of various OS and browser stats. When it comes to browser share, Edge was not popularly used to visit U.S. Government websites. Chrome was on top with 44.4%, Followed up Safari with 27.6%, Internet Explorer at 12.3%, and then Firefox at 5.9% and Edge at 3.9%. Though all these government percentages may be bleak for Microsoft, the latest AdDuplex December report also shows strong adoption for Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, so things can only go up from Microsoft from here on out.
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Windows 10 Visits To US Government Sites Surpass Windows 7 For the First Time

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  • Plot twist (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:17PM (#55825597)

    The calls to the sites was windows 10 reporting home.

    • Maybe there's a confounding factor, like for example Windows 10 users need to visit the government more because they're more likely to be living off GOVERNMENT CHEESE.

  • by Templer421 ( 4988421 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:20PM (#55825611)

    Sir not appearing in this film.

    • by edis ( 266347 )

      Just when you thought it was not. You want OS that is neither expired, nor taken out of your hands.

    • Because it is such a small user base (GNU/Linux) while Android Linux has made it on the list.

      GUN/Linux distributions are still a Server OS. And most of its usage will not have people going to government sites.

      What I actually far more interesting is Windows (all versions) is under 50%, Chrome Browser is nearly as high as Windows users. Apple iOS connections still exceed Android by a small margin.

  • by ad454 ( 325846 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:21PM (#55825617) Journal

    Compared to visits to USA government tracking sites, due to back doors placed in Windows 10, as well as newer Intel and AMD processors with ME and PSP?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "due to back doors placed in Windows 10"
      Do you have any evidence these backdoors exist? Surely you must have some evidence to back up your statement. People have been looking for these mythical back doors in every version of Windows since 3.0 but have never found any evidence of intentional backdoors secreted away in an MS OS. And if these backdoors do exist why are hackers wasting time on creating exploit tools when they could just use the pre-existing back doors?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        People have been looking for these mythical back doors in every version of Windows since 3.0 but have never found any evidence

        _NSAKEY_ issue with W2K and XP.

      • You are kidding right? There have been so many ways to compromise Windows and take over the machine it spawned an entire anti-virus industry. True it would be impossible to prove any of the holes were intentional, but saying "You can't prove any of them were intentional so it never happened" is as absurd as your implication that there is no proof Microsoft can't be trusted.
        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          There are ways to compromise macOS and GNU/Linux, so I guess they have backdoors and/or are intentional too!
  • I found that it was hard to avoid updates enforced on you - my quick review of the Windows 10 options on computer of my client has shown like 40 days delay before it is to happen anyway. While another notebook hung during that monolith update, with subsequent reversal of whole shebang. If you are engineer, you can start having good ideas of what awaits ahead with Windows 10 style of arrangement. Effectively, you are not even in control of the OS anymore - if this OS to be.

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:34PM (#55825677)

    Of the 2.54 billion visits to U.S. Government websites over the past 90 days:
    - 20.9% came from Windows 10
    - 20.7% from Windows 7
    - 2.7% from Windows 8.1
    - 0.05% from Windows 8
    - 0.8% from other OS

    Either they can't count, or that 0.8% does not include OS X/macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, BSD, etc in which case that 0.8% is the total number of Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 95 users.

    When it comes to browser share:
    - 44.4% for Chrome
    - 27.6% for Safari
    - 12.3% for Internet Explorer
    - 5.9% for Firefox
    - 3.9% for Edge

    Safari is only available on OS X/macOS and iOS, so it's clear the percentages for the OS are only for Windows.

    Are they afraid to tell us the number of people who don't use Microsoft on their computers/tablets/phones?

    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:38PM (#55825701)

      "edit", sort of (another feature that Slashdot lacks)

      The numbers are all there on the website, it's just BeauHD writing trolling summaries once again.

      p.s.: my comment was written in accordance with the Slashdot tradition: post angry comment first, read article later.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Since the OS numbers only total up to 45.15%, where did the other 54.85% come from?

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Since the OS numbers only total up to 45.15%, where did the other 54.85% come from?

        OS/2 Warp, most likely. I hear that the government still has tens of thousands of those. I'm sure you can get an NCSA Mosaic browser for them.

        • OS/2 Warp, most likely. I hear that the government still has tens of thousands of those. I'm sure you can get an NCSA Mosaic browser for them.

          Most government sites don't work correctly without Javascript, let alone CSS, either because the sites are spying on you or because the government is shit at HTML, or both. I'm betting on both.

      • by suss ( 158993 )

        iOS 25%
        Android 18%
        MacIntosh 9%
        ChromeOS 1%
        Other 1%

        Source: the link in the story that goes to https://analytics.usa.gov/ [usa.gov]

    • by Anonymous Coward

      > Safari is only available on OS X/macOS and iOS

      News to me, I have a VM that's been running Safari on Win 7 for browser testing a good 3-4 years now. Could you substantiate your assertion please?

    • From the site, other is actually other versions of Windows. It says "other" not "other OS". The other operating systems are listed separately.

  • Shocking news! (Score:5, Informative)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @08:45PM (#55825725)

    After discontinuing sales of Windows 7 licenses, blocking Windows 7 (and 8 updates) on 7th generation Core CPUs, and forcing malicious upgrades from 7 to 10 without user's consent, Windows 10 is finally starting to surpass 7. I can't believe this was possible.

  • by Jimmyandben ( 5209895 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @09:08PM (#55825811) Journal
    If it wasn't for all of the dirty tatics that Microsoft made happen, I might be more inclined to trust them. The forced Telemetry was the toughest fo swallow and can't justify it for our users or safe guarding our data. Windows 2016 seems to have forced telemetry built in as well which means we may have to choose another system such as BSD or Linux. These are real discussions happening at our company because of the distrust that Microsoft has enabled.
    • These are real discussions happening at our company because of the distrust that Microsoft has enabled.

      We had those as well. But then given that Windows 10 Enterprise versions don't have the telemetry enabled, and that Microsoft is already a trusted partner for cloud services for confidential and secret documents all that happened was that Windows 10 was rubbers stamped for trail roll-out.

      For all they've done in the consumer space and small business market, it is largely irrelevant in the enterprise where MS makes most of its money.

    • And turning off the telemetry is trivial: https://www.oo-software.com/en... [oo-software.com]
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @09:25PM (#55825881)
    ... An operating system (Windows 10) that was given away as a free upgrade to older versions finally has more hits than those older versions. An operating system which had such a poor uptake when it was given away for free and subsequently Microsoft had to try to trick users into upgrading to it, finally has more hits than those older versions. Yeah, that is something that Microsoft should crow about on /. .

    .

    Geesh.

  • It's eye opening to see mobile (iOS and Android) makes up about 43% and desktops only (Windows and Mac) only about 55%. I'm assuming Linux is a lot of the "Other" at 0.7%.

  • So the FSB is up to date unlike the NT Servers they are targeting.

  • Considering that Win7 only has 2 more years of security patches, I suspect most people like myself are just migrating because it will be mandatory pretty soon and don't want to wait until the last minute.

    Combine that with a lot of new systems are incapable of booting Win 7 (Win 7 can't boot from NVMe SSDs, and even with UEFI boot Win 7 needs legacy BIOS/CSM because it uses INT10 VGA BIOS calls... a lot of new systems don't have this in firmware anymore.) And even if it would work MSFT won't allow Win7 to

  • by pkiff ( 959365 ) on Thursday December 28, 2017 @10:56PM (#55826217)
    Both the summary and the original article fail to explain that the "Other OS" with 0.8% actually means Other *Windows* OSes. They fail completely in providing useful context about how the percentages of Windows flavours compare to those of iOS, Android, and Mac. Here are the missing stats that come from the analytics.usa.gov site: iOS 25.2%, Android 18.2%, Macintosh 9%. This also explains how Safari is the 2nd most popular browser with 26%.
  • So, 1 trillion in American imperial?
  • Windows for business (Pro and Enterprise) is a piece of cr*p and is loaded with garbage. I'm at work and totally want to play Candy Crush. WTF is going through their heads? And they bend over backwards to collect user data. Particularly, they try to get users to create and use a Microsoft account on a new PC or instance of Windows. I have a MSDN subscription and can get/install any version of Windows or Windows Server that I want. I wiped and reloaded my workstation with Windows 10 Enterprise. If you haven'
  • ...government website visits your Windows 10 computer.

  • So, their page says their software is open-source, including the "collector" ( https://github.com/18F/analyti... [github.com] ). Unfortunately, all that seems to be is some JavaScript to fetch and process Google Analytics data.

    I thought the US government would be able to do an adequate job of collecting and processing "meta-data" without giving all of that information to Google ...

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