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According to statistics released by Net Applications market shares of Internet Explorer for December 2008 were 68%, a first time fall to under 70%. 21% of surfers used Firefox and Safari 8%.

Compared with November, this marks a drop of 2% for the IE browser, which a year ago had secured an 80% share of the browser market. Reasons for the drop are numerous: For one, a lot of users find it difficult to make friends with the new IE version and then there's the repeated appearance of security leaks in the MS browser. Microsoft has also lost points in the OS market. Current estimates label 89% of PC users as Windows users. In 2007, it was 92%, with Apple Mac OS X attracting for the first time 10% of users. (up from 6.5% last year). Net Application statistics put the growth of Linux users up from 0.45% to 0.85%.

With Google's announcement regarding the end of official support for IE 6, the drop in Microsoft's browser market shares is likely to continue over the next few months. Google is advising users to change to Firefox or Google Chrome. Experience shows that in similar cases, half of users migrate to Firefox without even considering the IE update.

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