Internet Explorer market share falls below 60 percent

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 percent to 59.95 percent.

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 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 jump from 24.52 to 24.59 percent of the market.

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 percent. Coming in fourth on the list was Apple's Safari browser, which logged a 4.72 percent piece of the market, up from 4.65 percent 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 piece of the market slipped from 2.37 percent to 2.30 percent. Opera's other browser, the Mini, saw its share increase from 0.78 to 0.79.