Net Applications, a great resource for watching market share trends, recently changed the way it weighs the data it gathers for browsers. We waited a little bit until things settled down before posting our next browser share roundup. Despite the slight changes, the main browser usage trend is unchanged: though its lead remains large, Internet Explorer is still losing ground to all other browsers. Firefox is steadily gaining, Safari remains in a nonthreatening third place, Chrome is happily carving out a small niche for itself, and poor Opera can't seem to budge from fifth place. In August, all browsers except for IE and Safari showed positive growth.

Between August and July, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 0.71 percentage points (from 67.68 percent to 66.97 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.51 percentage points (from 22.47 percent to 22.98 percent). Safari remained steady at 4.07 percent while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.25 percentage points (from 2.59 percent to 2.84 percent). Opera budged 0.07 percentage points from 1.97 percent to 2.04 percent. Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions still dominate (we can only hope that when Windows 7 becomes generally available next month this will start to change since the OS sports IE8 out-of-the-box):

Internet Explorer 6.0 : 25.25 percent

: 25.25 percent Internet Explorer 7.0 : 21.10 percent

: 21.10 percent Internet Explorer 8.0 : 15.10 percent

: 15.10 percent Firefox 3.0 : 12.48 percent

: 12.48 percent Firefox 3.5 : 8.88 percent

: 8.88 percent Safari 4.0 : 2.55 percent

: 2.55 percent Chrome 2.0 : 2.50 percent

: 2.50 percent Internet Explorer 8.0 - Compatibility Mode : 2.46 percent

: 2.46 percent Opera 9.x : 1.76 percent

: 1.76 percent Firefox 2.0: 1.37 percent

Data source: Net Applications

You can see the market share pie for August 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. Chrome's lead over Opera is much more significant at Ars. With Safari 4's release, the browser has managed to finally surpass Internet Explorer on our site, despite having one sixteenth of IE's share worldwide.