Net Application's latest survey of web browser usage show that Internet Explorer dropped from 54.3 percent in May to 53.7 percent in June. By contrast, Google's Chrome browser jumped up from 12.5 percent in May to 13.1 percent in June to settle in third place. The Firefox browser from Mozilla was in second place but stayed at 21.7 percent in June, the same percentage it had in May.

Apple's Safari browser was in fourth place in the survey as its market share went up slightly from 7.3 percent in May to 7.5 percent in June. Fifth place went to the Opera browser, but its market share went down from 2 percent in May to 1.7 percent in June.

As far as individual versions of web browsers, Internet Explorer 9's market share went up slightly from 4.2 percent in May to 5.7 percent in June. The browser, which was first launched last March, cannot be run on Microsoft's Windows XP which is still used by a large number of PCs around the world.

In a post on Microsoft's official blog site, the company's head of Internet Explorer's marketing, Roger Capriotti, stated that Internet Explorer 9's usage on Windows 7 based PCs is surging up, stating, "IE9 has now become the most popular modern browser on Windows 7 in the US. IE9 is now just second overall in the US behind IE8 with 21.8% usage share as of the last day of June. Worldwide, IE9 usage share on Windows 7 is exiting the month with 17.0% usage share for June."

Mozilla officially released Firefox 5 in June and it its first official month it grabbed onto 2.1 percent of the web browser market compared to 10.5 percent for the previous version Firefox 4. One other interesting stat from Net Applications is the rise of the iPad in total web browser usage; Apple's tablet device now represents 1.03 percent of all web browser usage.