Web developers have waited for what seems like ages for this month to come along. Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. Firefox's steady gain continues, 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 October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth.

Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). Safari increased 0.18 percentage points (from 4.24 percent to 4.42 percent) while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.41 percentage points (from 3.17 percent to 3.58 percent). Opera slid 0.02 percentage points (from 2.19 percent to 2.17 percent). Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse). Still, given that IE6 had 23.30 percent of the market in October, this means that Firefox has now surpassed it:

You can see the market share pie for October 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, and Chrome's lead over Opera is much more significant at Ars. Compared to last month, IE gained share (possibly due to our review of Windows 7), but so did Firefox. Safari dropped quite a bit, while Chrome and Opera gained.