Internet Explorer market share falls below 60 per cent

Microsoft's share of the browser market slipped further last month

Microsoft's share of the browser market continued to erode last month, according to a recent traffic report.

The April report from traffic analysis firm Net Applications found that over the month Microsoft's share of the browser market fell from 60.65 per cent to 59.95 per cent.

The drop is part of an ongoing decline in market share for the Microsoft browser. In June of 2009, Internet Explorer logged a market share of 68.32 per cent and has seen its share drop every month since.

The Mozilla Firefox browser continued to edge towards Internet Explorer's top spot. The open-source browser saw its share of the market jump from 24.52 to 24.59 per cent.

Google's Chrome browser showed the biggest gain in April, growing its share of the market by six tenths of a point up to 6.73 per cent. Coming in fourth on the list was Apple's Safari browser, which logged a 4.72 per cent piece of the market, up from 4.65 per cent in March.

Among the five other browsers listed in the report, only Opera saw a drop in market share for the month. The browser's chunk of the market slipped from 2.37 per cent to 2.30 per cent. Opera's other browser, the Mini, saw its share increase from 0.78 to 0.79 per cent.