Internet Explorer has managed to hit a new low, and rival applications Firefox and Safari are directly responsible for it. IE's market share has been depreciating for some time now, and even with the launch of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft is unlikely to climb back to its apex of dominance. Back in 2004, IE's market share was in excess of 90%. Both Firefox and Safari have been continually eroding Microsoft's position on the browser market, and while Mozilla and Apple have not managed anything spectacular over night, the two companies are indeed converting users away from IE, and what is even more important, actually keeping them.

According to statistics put together by Market Share by Net Applications, Internet Explorer owned just 77.86% of the browser market, at the end of September. The past month marks yet another acute descendant step for IE, and the loss of almost an entire point. IE dropped from 78.68% in August to under 77%, as the browser seems to be in free fall. And although Internet Explorer 7 has been available for almost a year, being a product superior in every way to Internet Explorer 6, users are not crowding to the new version. Moreover, the adoption of Windows Vista, which comes with its own built-in version of IE7, is also not helping at all with the market share.

And while IE dropped 0.8%, Firefox and Safari are picking up the crumbs. Mozilla's open source browser has jumped from 14.56% in August to 14.88% in September. Firefox is slowly regaining the market share it has lost between April and July, the crucial period when users were forced to migrate from version 1.5 to 2.0 of Firefox. Safari also did its part, contributing to knocking a few percentages off from under Internet Explorer. Apple's browser increased its market share from 4.68% to 5.07% in the past two months.