2010 will be remembered as the year when Chrome took off despite Microsoft's attempts to hold on to its shrinking browser market share. It looks like Internet Explorer's two months of market share gains were an aberration. Other trends are continuing as before: Firefox is steady between 20 and 25 percent share, Chrome is steadily moving forward, and Safari trudges onward. Opera, meanwhile, is still hanging on to the leftover scraps. Everyone but Microsoft saw at least a modest market share gain in September.

Between August and September, Internet Explorer dropped 0.75 percent, a drop bigger than the last three months. Firefox, meanwhile, went up a mere 0.03 percent. Chrome gained 0.46 percent, making it the biggest winner this month. Safari was up 0.11 percent and Opera grabbed another 0.02 percent.

IE has managed to fall back below the 60 percent mark. At 59.65 percent, this is the lowest point for the Microsoft browser. This drop comes despite the overwhelming monthly gains of IE8 and the release of theInternet Explorer 9 beta right in the middle of September. Microsoft told Ars that the beta has been downloaded 6 million times in the last two weeks. Nevertheless, this translates to a mere 0.25 percent of the whole market for those two weeks, and when looking at the whole month of August, it's only 0.10 percent. We might see more progress in October.

Unfortunately for Web developers everywhere, IE6 (15.55 percent) continues to be more popular than IE7 (10.39 percent), though this month its share declined more than its successor. IE6's share can be attributed to businesses still using customized intranet applications, and XP's much bigger installed base compared to Vista's (especially in developing countries). We expect that IE7 will drop below the 10 percent mark next month, while IE6 may finally fall under 15 percent.

Data source: Net Applications

If we take a look at the last 12 months, the stabilization of IE's share is quite obvious. Firefox seems to be in the same boat: it remains far away from what may be the unreachable 25 percent mark, having lost all the share it gained in the last year. Its market share is actually lower than it was a year ago. Chrome's progress is very noticeable in the chart above. It seemed to have found resistance at the 7 percent mark, but it almost broke through to 8 percent in September. Safari's gains are just short of 1 percentage point, while Opera's are almost insignificant.

Data source: Ars Technica

As always, things at Ars are very different. There was no place-changing this time: Firefox continues to dominate, Chrome is second, Safari is third, IE is fourth, and Opera brings up the rear. Last month, Firefox lost share, as did Opera. Meanwhile, Chrome, Safari, and IE all gained.