Net Applications

Internet Explorer has been facing growing competition from rival browsers, but it's still the leader with more than 50 percent of the market, according to Net Applications.

IE grabbed a 54 percent market share last month, down from 56.7 percent a year ago. Traveling further back in time reveals an ongoing decline from November 2007 when Microsoft held almost 80 percent of the desktop browser market.

In second place with a 20 percent share in June, Firefox has also seen its share gradually drop. Mozilla's browser scored a 23 percent share a year ago after hitting a peak of more than 25 percent in April of 2010.

So which browser is gaining market share? Google Chrome.

With a share of 19 percent last month, Google's desktop browser was right behind Firefox. Chrome has consistently eaten up more share since its debut in late 2008, capturing 7.4 percent in June 2010 and almost 14 percent in June 2011. If this trend continues, Chrome could easily surpass Firefox this month as the No. 2 browser, at least as seen by Net Applications.

Drilling down further, Internet Explorer 8 was the No. 1 browser in June with a share of 26.6 percent.

But IE 9 kept growing, carving out a share of 19 percent, up from just 6 percent a year ago. IE 6 and 7 both continued to decline in use last month.

In the world of mobile browsers, Apple's Safari was dominant, with almost 66 percent of the market. Google's Android browser took second place with almost 20 percent. And Opera Mini was No. 3 with a 10.5 percent share.

Net Applications tracks the number of unique visits to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites and includes only one unique visit per site per day. Around 160 million unique visits per month are used to compile its results.