While there were encouraging figures for Microsoft among the various Windows versions, the overall share fell to 89.23 per cent.

Other operating systems that were recorded by the company were Mac OS X which had 9.2 per cent and Linux which had a minuscule 1.56 per cent. The OS X figure represented a rise of 1.43 per cent while Linux' share slipped by 0.22 per cent from March.

Among the Windows versions, the share of Windows 7 fell below 50 per cent for the first time since the release of Windows 10.

However, Microsoft's latest release did not progress much month on month, with the March figure being 14.15 per cent and the April figure, the one just released by Net Applications, being 14.35 per cent.

Both Windows 8 and 8.1 are still being used by a fairly big number of users worldwide, with the former growing from 2.45 per cent to 2.95 per cent while the latter fell from 9.56 per cent to 9.16 per cent.

And WIndows XP is still a force to be reckoned with, favoured by 9.66 per cent of users.

Net Applications' figures are collated from 160 million unique users every month, data which comes from its monitoring around 40,000 websites for its customers.