Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, and users continue to cling to older versions, but IE8 has finally surpassed IE7, and will likely pass IE6, easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser among the tech-savvy, before we see the New Year. Firefox's steady gain continues and it will also likely hit the 25 percent mark before the end of the year. Safari remains in third place but Chrome seems to be eyeing it hungrily, leaving poor Opera in dead-last fifth place. In November, only the third-party browsers showed positive growth.

Between November and October, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.03 percentage points (from 64.64 percent to 63.61 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.67 percentage points (from 24.07 percent to 24.74). Safari dipped 0.06 percentage points (from 4.42 percent to 4.36 percent) while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.34 percentage points (from 3.58 percent to 3.92 percent). Opera grabbed 0.14 percentage points (from 2.17 percent to 2.31 percent).

In terms of browser versions, Internet Explorer saw the following changes: version 6.0 dropped 1.21 percentage points, version 7.0 dropped 1.28 percentage points, and version 8.0 gained 1.50 percentage points, meaning IE8 has finally overtaken IE7. Meanwhile, in Firefox land, version 3.5 gained 1.26 percentage points, version 3.0 dropped 0.64 percentage points, and version 2.0 dropped 0.09 percentage points. Safari saw version 4.0 gain 0.06 percentage points and the 3.x versions drop 0.12 percentage points. Finally, Chrome saw its version 4.0 gain 0.19 percentage points and its version 3.0 also gain 0.19 percentage points.

You can see the market share pie for November 2009, according to Net Applications, at the top of this post. The graph just above shows how things at Ars are very different: Firefox continues to dominate, but the default browsers for Windows and Mac OS X still show their strength, and Chrome's lead over Opera is much more significant at Ars. Compared to last month, IE gained share, while Firefox lost some. Safari dropped quite a bit, while Chrome and Opera gained.