A new study released by Net Applications have shown that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is starting to lose market share in favor of its two biggest competitors, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. But the Redmond based company can still take pride in the fact that about 1.1 billion people, the approximate equivalent of a 73.01 percent market share, still use IE for their internet browsing experience.

Looking at last year’s statistics, the Internet Explorer browser had an approximate 79 percent market share. However, during the last few months, it has seen a steep fall down, while 6 percent of the internet browser’s users switched to other companies’ products.

Mozilla’s Firefox is Internet Explorer’s main competitor. The web browser now holds 19 percent of the market, and is rapidly expanding the number of people that are using it. Over the last year, Firefox’s market share raised more than 4 percent, from the 14.65 percent it owned last summer. The browser’s latest version acquired 1 percent of the global market during the first day of its release.

The bad news for Mozilla is that the main people who downloaded Firefox 3 where users upgrading from Firefox 2. Even though the company’s latest version of the browser has managed to get about 4 percent of the web browser market, only less than 1 percent have been people that previously used other companies’ products.

Apple also hit the jackpot with Safari, increasing the number of people that use it from 4.71 percent last year, to 6.31 as of this month. The reason for this seems to be the increased popularity of the company’s products, and the fact that each Apple computer comes with Safari already installed.