The open-source browser from Mozilla has managed to grab a share of the market representing no less than half of the Microsoft proprietary browser, according to StatCounter data. Essentially, the market measuring firm indicates that Internet Explorer's share has dropped to under 60% while Firefox has grown continually to its detriment and is up to 30%. The statistics made public are valid for users worldwide. The situation is much worse in the US for IE and Microsoft, StatCounter explains.

In the US alone, IE dropped from 56 .18% in June 2009 to just 54.77% in July. This while Firefox jumped from 31.5% to 32.34% in the same period of time. Safari is the bronze winner in the browser race with 7.59% while Chrome accounts for 3% and Opera for 0.72% in July. But the growth of Safari, Chrome and Opera pales in comparison to that of Firefox.

Worldwide IE had, in July 2009, 59.69% of the browser market, having in fact managed to increase its share from 59.49% the previous month. Meanwhile, Firefox jumped from 30.33% to 30.91%. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator, applauded the news, but indicated that the trends were nothing new. “IE is falling pretty fast,” he stated. “Chrome, Safari, and Opera, and Firefox are growing pretty solidly, and all at the expense of Internet Explorer. The current state of things, according to StatCounter, in rough terms are this: IE is about 60%, Firefox is about 30% and Other is about 10%. It's not an ideal landscape, but it's certainly an improvement over just 5 years ago when IE was more than 95% of the browser market.”

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 to web in March 2009, but the Redmond company's most standard compliant browser seems just as incapable as its precursor IE7 to change IE's overall downward trajectory. At the same time, Firefox, with version 3.5 released at the end of June 2009, continues to swallow market share and to convert the associated audience from Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 Final for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.