The browser wars are heating up. Just in the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera have all set new records for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent. The period is also significant because it is the first time Chrome has beaten Safari to third place, and all of the numbers come at the expense of IE, which is losing users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month.

Sure, Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice still looks nice, but projections from Net Applications suggest that it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of 2010. Net Applications monitors incoming traffic to over 40,000 websites to generate a sample size of about 160 million unique visitors per month, so if they say that it’s so, it likely is.

[Engadget]