Although Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) continued to bleed market share last month, Apple Inc.'s Safari was an even bigger loser during February, an Internet metrics company said Monday.

Mozilla achieved an important milestone in November, sailing past 20% market share over an entire month for the first time since its release in November 2004. While Safari and Chrome were able to take over share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as well, Mozilla’s Firefox leaped by almost a full percentage point over October, according to data provided by Net Applications.

Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser is on pace to hit the 20% market-share mark next month, a Web metrics company said today.

Remember when Internet Explorer ruled the Web, to the tune of about 98% of the browser market share? Those were happy days for Internet Explorer. Until Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape. Internet Explorer’s market share has been sliding ever since ...

A new report shows that that slide has put Internet Explorer’s market share at just under 60%.

It has been six weeks since Firefox 3 has been released and if we believe market share numbers provided by an ongoing survey of NetApplications, then it appears that Mozilla has had a successful launch with market share gains, especially at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

NetApplications is out with a couple of new metrics of market share for operating systems and browsers, and the news is good for open source. Topping their findings, Microsoft Windows' market share has dropped below 90 percent for the first time in its measurements. The share erosion is largely attributed to increased interest in the Mac platform, but Linux is cited as on the rise as well.

The latest figures from French based Internet traffic analyst XiTiMonitor shows that the Mozilla's Firefox web browser has continued to take market share off Microsoft's Internet Explorer across the globe over the past year, with a significant spike in Firefox usage in December 2007.

Firefox is on a decline. It may not be as steady as Internet Explorer's death spiral, and it certainly has not been going on for as long, but if the last three months are any indication, Firefox will never hit that 25 percent market share mark that looked all but certain just a few short months ago.

On the back of the release last week of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla's open-source browser gained market share at the expense of rivals Internet Explorer (IE) and Safari, Net Applications said Monday.