Windows 7 is finally seeing a small decline in marketshare, the Next Web reports that Windows 8 now has a marketshare of 2.36 percent, up from 1.78 percent at the beginning of January 2013. The marketshare of Microsoft's new OS grew just 0.58 percent last month, an even smaller gain than the 0.66 percentage point growth seen in December. 

As already mentioned, Windows 7 recently passed the 45 percent mark, but now it looks like it may have peaked. Mind you, it’s still early to tell, but it’s certainly telling that Windows 7 has lost share for the first time since its release (actually the first time since December 2008 when a beta leaked on BitTorrent). Windows Vista meanwhile slipped 0.43 percentage points (from 5.67 percent to 5.24 percent) and should thus fall under the 5 percent mark soon. Windows XP managed to jump the same amount, 0.43 percentage points (from 39.08 percent to 39.51 percent), although thankfully it didn’t gain back its losses from December (0.74 percentage).

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month. The service monitors some 40,000 Web sites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views.