The year 2010 ended quite well for two products from Microsoft and Google, at least when it comes to specific market share numbers. Windows 7 passed the 20 percent mark while Chrome almost reached double digits. Despite IE8's strong growth and the IE9 beta program, Internet Explorer has hit a historic low. Firefox is stubbornly holding on to its users, while Chrome and Safari continue their growth. Before we go into further detail with browsers, let's take a peek into the world of Windows.

Windows 7 has been steadily stealing share from Windows Vista and Windows XP ever since it was first released. It is now installed on one in five computers. Its predecessor Vista never managed to achieve that feat. In the 12 months since release, Microsoft sold 240 million licenses of Windows 7; by now that number is surely approaching 300 million.

Between January and December 2010, Windows XP fell almost 10 percentage points to 56.72 percent market share. In the same period, Windows Vista lost over five percentage points to 12.11 percent. Windows 7 meanwhile has gained over 13 percentage points, pushing it to 20.87 percent.

Now the browsers: Between November and December, Internet Explorer dropped another 1.18 percentage points. Firefox, meanwhile, edged forward with 0.06 percentage points. Chrome gained 0.73 percentage points, making it December's biggest winner. Safari was up 0.34 percentage points and Opera crept up 0.03 percentage points.

At 57.08 percent, Internet Explorer is once again at a new low. This latest drop comes despite public IE9 builds and frequent Microsoft announcements about pushing the Web forward. IE9 last month grew to a mere 0.46 percent. IE8 also barely budged forward to 33.02 percent, but it's still the world's most popular browser.

Unfortunately for Web developers everywhere, IE6 (13.06 percent) continues to be more popular than IE7 (8.76 percent), and the former's share even declined less than the latter. The good news is that IE7 is well below the 10 percent mark, and IE6 should follow suit sometime later this year.

The above snapshot of the past 12 months illustrates the general browser use trend for 2010. Internet Explorer looked as if it were going to stabilize at the 60 percent mark, and fluctuated around there for quite some time, but has since resumed its steady slide. Firefox remains far below the apparently unreachable 25 percent mark; in the last six months it has not once broken the 23 percent point. Chrome has almost doubled its share to 9.98 percent while Safari has gained over 1 percentage point. Opera (not shown) is essentially static at 2 percent.

As always, things at Ars are very different. Firefox continues to dominate, Chrome is a solid second, Safari is third, IE is fourth, and Opera brings up the rear. Last month, all browsers gained share except for Safari.