Microsoft's IE loses more share, slides to new low

Overall, Microsoft's browser lost 0.6 percentage points of its market share last month, ending January with 67.6 percent, the lowest number since Net Applications began tracking browser data in 2005. In the last 12 months, IE has slipped about 8 percentage points in market share, nearly as much as the 9.8 percent drop during the preceding 24 months.

However, January's drop was nowhere near the 1.6 percentage points IE lost in December 2008 or the 1.5 percentage points it gave up in November.

IE8 posted a 0.92 percent market share for the month as a whole, and accounted for slightly more share, 0.99 percent, in the six days since Microsoft issued the RC1 build last week . The next major upgrade to IE, Version 8 has been slowly gaining market share since its Beta 2 launched late last August.

But for the third month in a row, Microsoft's main competitors -- Mozilla, Apple, and Google -- all gained share at IE's expense.

Mozilla's Firefox increased its share by 0.19 percentage point to finish January with 21.5 percent of the market, a new record for the open-source browser. In the last 12 months, Firefox's market share has climbed 4.3 percentage points.

Approximately 85 percent of all people running Firefox have now upgraded to Version 3.0, according to Net Applications, which collects browser share data from the users who visit the thousands of Web sites the company monitors. Apple's Safari again showed even more impressive gains than Firefox as it boosted its share by 0.36 percentage point to 8.3 percent, also a record. January was the third month running that Safari increased its share by a larger amount than Firefox. In the last 90 days, Safari has gained 1.7 percentage points, while Firefox has increased its share by 1.5 percentage points.