What gives?

Net Applications, which provides widely followed browser market statistics, posted a report and chart for its most recent analytical period that spells out good news for anyone working on non-Microsoft browsers. The world's leading browser version by market share, according to Net Applications, is Internet Explorer 7.0 - - which saw its share of the market pegged at 47.32 percent.

Now, Net Applications also found that Internet Explorer 6.0 maintains 19.21 percent market share, and that still gives Microsoft ownership of more than two-thirds of the PC browser segment. But the trend is clear and it has been for some time: other browsers, like Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari, are picking up share at Microsoft's expense.

And because no one, single browser application owns most of the market, how the Web winds up on hundreds of millions of the world's PCs and handhelds now varies greater than ever before.

Ah, you say: Microsoft is currently beta-testing, and is closer to launching, IE 8.0. That could pull things back in Redmond's direction, right? There's a good argument to be made, though, that IE 8.0 -- given the many technical hurdles it must overcome -- will only add to Microsoft's challenges in the browser space.

There are additional implications for all of us, too. As each PC and each device is confronted with its own set of performance, security and use models, the decision of which browser to use becomes more and more critical over time. In the business world, planning and testing are time consuming tasks but they'll become more critical in choosing browsers than most companies have had to encounter until now.

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