According to latest data released by Net Applications, Internet Explorer to loose market share in the pas month. Despite the release of Internet Explorer 8.0, Microsoft’s web browser has dropped below 67 percent, reaching its lowest market share in almost two years.

 

Since April 2007, Internet Explorer lost more than 12 percent, while is direct rival Mozilla’s Firefox gained 7 percent. According to NetApplications, in March 2009 Firefox reached 22.05 percent.

 

During the same period, Apple’s Safari almost doubled its market share from 4.61 percent to 8.23. The new kid on the block , Google’s Chrome continued to raise its market share slowly but steady. Seven months after its initial launch, Google Chrome has already surpassed Opera and reached 1.23 percent, which is quite an achievement for a browser which is still in its infancy.

 

Of course, Chrome’s success is tied to Google’s impressive marketing effort to promote its browser. However, Microsoft could not be happy seeing that its browser is still bleeding market share, but is hard to tell what they will do about it, especially since Windows 7 won’t be tied anymore to Internet Explorer.

 

Last month it was reported that the latest build of Windows 7 includes an option to delete "iexplore.exe", making Internet Explorer 8 unusable.

It will be interesting to see how Internet Explorer will evolve without having Windows on its side.