Last month was a mix of good news and bad news for Microsoft. The good? Windows XP finally fell below the 60 percent mark. The bad? Internet Explorer continues to explore new market share lows as IE8 lost market share for the first time and the IE9 beta failed to capture the attention of the browsing public. Meanwhile Firefox slips a tad farther away from the 25 percent market share mark, while Chrome and Safari continue their growth. Before we go into detail on the browser front, let's check in on our old friend, Windows XP.

This time last year, close to 70 percent of web browsing happened on Windows XP. Since then, XP has fallen almost 10 percentage points to 59.07 percent market share. In the same period, Windows Vista lost almost six percentage points to 12.88 percent, with an accelerating decline over the last three months). Windows 7 meanwhile has gained over 14 percentage points, pushing it to 18.24 percent. At Ars, our readers have embraced Microsoft's latest operating system much faster. 24.73 percent of Ars readers use Windows XP, 7.89 percent are on Vista, and 28.18 percent have Windows 7.

Now the browsers: Between September and October, Internet Explorer dropped a modest 0.39 percent. Firefox, meanwhile, fell 0.14 percent. Chrome gained 0.49 percent, making it the biggest winner this month. Safari was up 0.06 percent and Opera dipped 0.11 percent.

At 59.26 percent, Internet Explorer has hit a new low point. This drop comes despite public IE9 builds and for the first time, help from IE8. Although Microsoft told Ars that over 900 partners have built Jump Lists for their sites (an IE9-only feature), the beta isn't being used as widely as it could be. IE9 last month grew to 0.28 percent (0.32 percent if you count compatibility mode). IE8, meanwhile, for the first time fell to 29.01 percent (32.04 with compatibility mode), but it's still the world's most popular browser.

Unfortunately for Web developers everywhere, IE6 (15.01 percent) continues to be more popular than IE7 (9.92 percent), though this month its share declined more. The good news is that IE7 has dropped below the 10 percent mark, and IE6 should drop below 15 percent next month.

The snapshot above of the past 13 months illustrates the general trend quite nicely. Firefox remains far away from what may be the unreachable 25 percent mark, having lost more share than it gained in the last year. IE continues its slide, while Chrome has more than doubled its share. Safari's gains are just short of 1 percentage point, while Opera (not shown) is essentially static.

As always, things at Ars are very different. There was no place-changing this time: Firefox continues to dominate, Chrome is a solid second, Safari is third, IE is fourth, and Opera brings up the rear. Last month, Firefox lost share, as did IE. Chrome and Safari gained, while Opera didn't budge.