The new browser on the wars.

More than a decade after Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer , the browser market competition has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has been downloaded 14 million times.

Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8 and Google came out with a quick beta of its Chrome browser.

Some recent data has shown in relation to market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above StatCounter indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.

This is the combined market share of IE8, IE7 and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its launch last March, capturing 16.7 percent market share, from 4 July These strong gains to make up the majority of the drop in IE7's market share of 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing users to upgrade IE7 at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Combine the three up, (IE6 + IE7 + IE8), but this is all together and only has a share of 54.4 percent versus 65.8 percent share in March 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its global market share erode by 11.4 percent. When this happened? He went to Firefox, Safari and Chrome. About 5 percent of the same, or nearly half, I went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That's not counting last week's update. See the dotted line just below the blue line IE8? This is a combined set of "other" browsers and seems to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a version of 30 days in the same graph, it shows Safari 4, with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. Has not yet given Firefox 3.5, but if you pressumir that makes up most of the rest dotted line that jumped to almost IE6 move last week, you can find out more or less what browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I used the latest data from the daily chart in this post, but embedded in the graph below which is monthly data from June 30). Like I said, this is the beginning of the data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling that will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows another browser share sources, most of them have not been updated since March). It is difficult to make any conclusions at this point, since the market is changing as fast as all the major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, Firefox and Safari (with Chrome joker thrown in). When all is said and done, we can see a big shake-up of market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is going to be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally morremdo.