Internet Explorer's desktop market share, which has been in a near-constant free-fall since 2003, held steady in November. Meanwhile, Chrome has moved to within striking distance of Firefox, with Mozilla's browser likely to lose its second place spot within the next few months.

Microsoft's browser gained a fraction, 0.01 points, for a total desktop share of 52.64 percent. Firefox dropped 0.37 points, for a share of 22.14 percent. Chrome gained 0.56 points, standing at 17.62 percent. Safari is down 0.43 points to 5.00 percent. Opera's share was essentially unchanged, down 0.01 points to 1.55 percent.

All in all, an unusual month. Chrome continues to be the only steady climber, but in November, its gains appeared to come at the expense of Firefox and Safari. Google's browser has been gaining at a rate of about half a point to a point each month, with no signs of slowing down. With Firefox treading water at best, and declining at worst, Chrome should overtake the Mozilla browser within the next four to six months.

Further evidence of this transition comes from StatCounter. StatCounter counts raw pageviews rather than making any attempt to gauge the number of users, so its numbers are not directly comparable to the Net Market Share figures we use. However, they are still instructive: in November, global traffic from Chrome overtook traffic from Firefox for the first time ever.

The mobile browser market continues to show substantial volatility. Safari and Opera Mini appeared to trade about 7 points—with Apple the loser in that transaction. The Android browser also declined. More surprisingly, Symbian and BlackBerry OS's browsers both saw growth, up 0.48 and 0.73 points, respectively.

Aggregating across both mobile and desktop markets, Internet Explorer's market share did still fall: mobile browsing grew during November, and this was enough to offset that tiny 0.01 point gain.

The version breakdowns for Chrome and Firefox follow the same pattern as has been seen over the past several months. Chrome's automatic upgrading is working well for most users, albeit with a slowly growing tail of non-upgraders.

Firefox's users are having a much harder time of things. Mozilla's failure to provide a robust automatic update process and refusal to force extensions to use a fixed, consistent programmatic interface means that upgrading requires manual intervention, and stands a good chance of breaking extensions. As a result, its rapid releases aren't showing the same clean cut overs and high adoption that Chrome achieves.

Internet Explorer's version breakdown is quite astonishing. The drops in both Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and gains by Internet Explorer 9, are consistent with recent history. The gain by Internet Explorer 6, however, is not. That browser's share has grown, from 7.5 percent to 8.33. This 0.83 point gain is more than even Internet Explorer 9 managed; that added only 0.47 points to its share in November.

Without Internet Explorer 6's gains, Redmond's browser would have lost share this month. While Microsoft is no doubt pleased that its downward slide has been halted—at least for November—the manner in which it has done so should temper that pleasure.

Here at Ars, Internet Explorer and Chrome both gained; Safari and Firefox both fell. Among mobile browsers, Android is closing the gap with Safari.

Listing image by Net Market Share