WebProNews

Firefox, the popular alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is picking up steam worldwide, gaining one percent in market share in the past six months.

And judging by the numbers, courtesy of OneStat, Mozilla swiped that market share directly from Microsoft, which was down about one percent worldwide. The Beast of Redmond still controls just under 85 percent of the worldwide browser market, though.

Firefox gleaned 12.7 percent of that market in June, up from 11.7 percent in January, the other three percent spread out among Safari, Opera, and Netscape (in that order). Firefox is most popular, commanding over 26 percent of the market in both countries.

The Brits and the Dutch are blowing the curve, however, giving up 11.2 and 9.75 percent to Firefox respectively, preferring the old Internet Explorer standby.

Mozilla's Firefox seems to have gained the most ground in the US, increasing the market share there by 3.5 percent in the past six months to 19.65 percent.

As for those using IE, about 56 percent of them are still using IE 6, followed by almost 28 percent upgrading to IE 7. Does that mean 16 percent are using older versions? It would appear so.