Once again, Firefox has maintained its grip on second place, behind Internet Explorer. And as Chrome falls away, there's now a gap of more than one percentage point between the browsers.

During 2011, Chrome's rise was unstoppable, and it looked as if taking second place was an inevitability. In 2012, Google's browser has come close, but never quite managed to close the gap, even with Google's extensive advertising and promotion.

Internet Explorer and Firefox are essentially unchanged, each gaining 0.03 points to 53.63 and 20.08 percent respectively. Chrome has dropped 0.27 points to 18.86 percent, Safari picked up 0.16 points for a total of 5.26 points, and Opera edged up slightly, by 0.04 points to 1.62 percent.

Firefox and Internet Explorer have both stopped shedding users to Chrome, halting Google's growth. This may merely be a temporary reprieve, but it could also be indicative of a broader trend: there's a lot less reason to switch to Chrome than there used to be.

Internet Explorer 9 arguably steadied Microsoft's ship. The browser isn't perfect, and probably doesn't do enough to win over advocates of Firefox or Chrome (thanks to their rich third-party ecosystems). But IE9 is attractive and more than fast enough for modern Web applications, putting it squarely in the "good enough" category.

Firefox too has had issues, but Mozilla has arguably put those behind it. Firefox's transition from a traditional "big infrequent release" model to a Chrome-like "every six weeks" caused early difficulties. Mozilla's update infrastructure wasn't able to handle these regular releases, forcing manual user-visible updates. However, the current Firefox updater is a lot simpler and more automatic, easing a lot of the pain. We see the evidence for this in the graphs charting the switching between Firefox versions. Although there's still a non-negligible legacy issue, most Firefox users are now on the treadmill and upgrading regularly.

The introduction of Firefox's rapid release schedule also caused alarm from Firefox-using companies such as IBM, with those companies claiming that enterprise users can't cope with such rapid releases. Mozilla has addressed this concern too, with the Firefox 10 Extended Support Release.

As such, a lot of the impetus to abandon Firefox and switch to Chrome—which users certainly threatened to do in the early days of the rapid release policy—has evaporated.

This makes Chrome a harder sell than it once was, and that may explain the interruption to its once-unstoppable growth.

On the mobile front, Safari's dominance remains absolute.

Internet Explorer 10 isn't a major concern yet, but this month it will start to pick up. The browser is likely to launch for Windows 7 simultaneously with Windows 8's general availability on October 26.