Even though the browser market is a multifaceted arena, the fact of the matter is that there are but two dominant players. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox have pretty much split the vast majority of browser users between them, with IE grabbing the lion's share and Firefox a distant runner-up. Still, the general tendency of the market is favorable not to the leader, but to the underdog. Internet Explorer is on a continuous descendant trajectory in terms of audience at a global level, while Firefox is climbing in the tops.

According to statistics published in February for the browser market, by Internet metrics company OneStat, Mozilla is continuously eroding IE's audience. Worldwide the open source browser jumped 1% from June 2007 to February 2008, while Microsoft dropped 2.5% in the same period.

"The global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is 13.76%. The global usage share increased 1.04% since June 2007," comScore revealed. "The total global usage share of Internet Explorer is 83.27% which is 2.54% less as in June 2007. Most people are still using Internet Explorer 6 which is 53.95% which is 2.45% less as in June 2007. The current global usage share of Internet Explorer 7 is 29.06% and increased 1.35% since June 2007."

The overall perspective over the browser market offered by comScore manages to illustrate a contradictory situation. Even though Internet Explorer 7 has been available for over a year, since October 2006, the vast majority of IE users are still running an obsolete version of the browser. This despite the fact that Microsoft has been serving IE7 via Automatic Updates since late 2006, and even cut down the Windows Genuine Advantage antipiracy mechanism from the install process of Internet Explorer 7.

Still, the global usage share lost by IE between June 2007 and February 2008 is not reflected in Firefox's jump. Moreover, additional members of the browser market also failed to gather the crumbs from the Internet Explorer feast. Apple's Safari only grew by 0.39% from 1.79% in mid 2007 to 2.18% in February 2008. By comparison, Opera lost 0.06%, and is now down to 0.55% from 0.61% last year.

Here are the links for the main browsers for Windows: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 and Firefox 2.0, Opera 9.5 Beta and Opera 9.2.