Internet Explorer 8’s strong adoption pace means that the predecessor of Internet Explorer 9 continues to be the fastest growing browser worldwide, outpacing rivals such as Chrome 5.0 and Firefox 3.6, even at 18 months after it was initially released.

Furthermore, IE8 is helping kill Internet Explorer 6, according to statistics made public by Internet metrics company Net Applications.

“In August, Internet Explorer 8 gained 1.17% to 32.04% (including compatibility mode and editions), while Internet Explorer 6 share declined 0.87% to 16.99%,” Net Applications revealed.

“Share of the nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6 fell below 5% in Europe and is nearing 5% in many developed markets such as U.S., UK and France. The major holdout for IE6 is China with over 46% share (50.5% if you include editions), which is significantly skewing global share.”

IE8’s market share increased from 26.87% to 27.90% between July 2010 and August, with the browser on an ascendant trend.

Not the same can be said about IE6 and IE7. Both versions lost market share, with IE6 down from 16.97% to 16.18% in the past couple of months, and IE7 dropping from 11.43% to 10.89% in the same period.

“Internet Explorer 8 grew 1.17% to account for 32.04% of usage share worldwide – more than three times that of Chrome’s 0.36% share growth. Firefox remained largely flat for August with a slight gain of 0.02% worldwide,” noted Ryan Gavin, senior director of Internet Explorer.

“The news today of August market share that Internet Explorer 6 is at or below 5% in many developed markets is overall goodness,” Gavin added.

Microsoft itself has joined the choir asking for the death of Internet Explorer 6. The Redmond company points out that those continuing to run IE6 are missing out on the new features of modern browsers, and are also giving headaches to developers which need to tailor websites to the obsolete browser.

“While there is still a significant number of Internet Explorer 6 users who have not upgraded, most of these users are concentrated in developing or emerging markets as well as enterprises with substantial application dependencies that take time to migrate,” Gavin said.

“Overall, August data shows a decline of Internet Explorer 6 usage of 0.87% to 16.99% worldwide, which is about half the market share Internet Explorer 8 has today.”

According to Net Applications, IE6’s market share has dropped as low as 5.3% in the United States and even less in Europe, under 5%.

Of course, with IE6 and IE7 users moving to more modern browsers, the overall share of IE saw a small dip. Between July and August, IE share worldwide went down 0.34% to 60.40%.

“But in a world of customer choice we are pleased that people are continuing to choose Internet Explorer 8 three times more often than other browsers when they make that move,” Gavin said.

IE8’s main rivals, Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5.0 both managed to gain market share the past months, but nowhere near as consistently as IE9’s predecessor.

Firefox 3.6 is up to 16.80% from 16.15% the previous month, pushing the overall share of Mozilla’s open source browser to 22.93%.

Chrome also gained share in August, and is now up to 7.52%, pushed by the growth of Chrome 5.0 from 6.48% to 6.77%.

Microsoft is currently gearing up to release the Beta development milestone of Internet Explorer 9, which will be delivered on September 15th.

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).

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 4 is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.

Chrome 5.0 is available for download here.