Barely five months after its release, Windows 8 has captured 3.17 percent of the desktop operating systems market share, though it’s still lagging behind Vista, according to the March stats from Net Applications.

Windows 8 shipped in October 2012, and its market share has grown slowly but steadily. In November, Net Analytics tracked a 1.09 percent share for Windows 8, which went up to 1.72 percent in December. It hit 2.26 percent in January, then 2.67 in February, and took another jump to reach 3.17 percent in March.

Windows captures more than 91 percent of the desktop OS market (Macs collectively have 6.94 percent and Linux systems, 1.17 percent), but Windows 7 is used on 44.73 percent of systems and XP has 38.73 percent of the market. At 3.17 percent of the market, Windows 8 is the fourth most popular OS, still behind Vista (which retains 4.99 percent) but ahead of Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion (2.65 percent).

The Net Applications stats are obtained by tracking 40,000 web sites and data captured from 160 million unique visitors across the web. Another company that tracks market share is StatCounter, which calculates its figures based on 15 billion page views from web sites it tracks. StatCounter’s figures are not very different from those of Net Applications, showing Windows 8 at 3.9 percent for March, a slight increase from 3.16 percent in February.

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