Mountain Lion, the latest version of Apple’s OS X desktop operating system, launched just over a month ago and according to the latest data from ad network Chitika, it already runs on over 10% of Macs. Following the obvious spike in installs right after launch — the OS was already running on 3.2% of Macs just 48 hours after its release — Mountain Lion’s share of web traffic to Chitika’s partner network continued to increase steadily, with no sign of letting up even a month later.
Mountain Lion’s adoption rate, says Chitika, is on track to outperform OS X Lion, its predecessor. It took Lion three months to reach 14% of total OS X traffic on the company’s network. There is, of course, a chance that Mountain Lion’s growth will plateau over the next two months, but if the current momentum continues, the new OS will pass 14% within the next three weeks. Reviews for Mountain Lion were generally more positive than for Lion and, as Chitika’s analysts point out, the new large number of new features make the new OS feels a bit more like a real upgrade than moving from Snow Leopard to Lion.
As for OS X in general, Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) continues to dominate with just over 43% of all traffic to Chitika’s network, followed by Lion (31.5%) and Leopard (13%). Among TechCrunch readers, by the way, Mountain Lion already accounts for 30% of all traffic and Lion is still the most popular version of OS X among our readers (41%) and just 25% of you still use Snow Leopard.
