Web browser market share results are out for September 2009 thanks to Market Share by Net Applications.

Internet Explorer has had more than a 1% drop this month, falling from 66.97% to 65.71%, it’s biggest single month drop since November 2008.

Other browser have had a good month, with Firefox moving from 22.98% to 23.75%.

Safari has moved from 4.07% to 4.24%, while Google Chrome has passed the 3% mark moving to 3.17% – up from 2.84%.

Opera has also had a good month, most likely helped by the release of Opera 10, hitting a share of 2.19%, up from 2.04%.

The browser wars seem to be slowly eroding Microsoft’s dominance, which can only lead to greater innovation and better browsers for consumers.

This months browser share statistics are out thanks to Market Share by Net Applications.

August has panned out like another typical month, with Internet Explorer dropping to 66.97% in August, from 67.68% in July.

Firefox jumped slightly to 22.98% from 22.47%, while Safari remained the same at 4.07%.

Google Chrome also increased its share from 2.59% to 2.84%, while Opera was also up from 1.97% to 2.04%.

Apple has released a new version of Safari, fixing several security and stability issues.

The update according to Apple includes the following changes:

• Stability improvements for webpages that use the HTML 5 video tag
• Stability improvements for 3rd-party plug-ins
• Stability improvements for Top Sites
• Fixes an issue that prevented some users from logging into iWork.com
• Fixes an issue that could cause web content to be displayed in greyscale instead of color

The update is available for both Mac and Windows and can be downloaded from the Safari website.

Web browser market share results for July 2009 have been released thanks to Market Share by Net Applications, and for another month Microsoft Internet Explorer is down again.

Internet Explorer dropped almost half a percent to 67.68%, while Firefox was up 0.04% to 22.47%.

Other winners for the month were were Safari up from 3.79% to 4.07%, and Google Chrome up from 2.40% to 2.59%.

Opera had another bad month falling from 2.03% to 1.97%.

Interesting results for Firefox, with the release of 3.5 seems to have failed at attracting any more market share. Full results for June and July 2009 are available online.

Nightly Mac builds of WebKit, the basis of which Safari and Google Chrome are built on, now include 3D CSS transforms.

3D CSS transforms allow web developers to manipulate objects in the third dimension with simple CSS rules. Current CSS3 standards do not include these 3D transforms, but Apple has submitted 3D CSS transforms to the W3C for consideration as an official CSS standard.

The 3D transforms are already available in iPhone OS 2.0 and up.

Users or developers wanting to check out this new feature can download the latest nightly build from WebKit. The following 3D transform demos are available:

• Charles Ying’s Snow Stack photo browser
• Peter Zich’s 3D Van “model” rotating in space
• Peter Zich’s 3D Image Fly, another image browser (hint: click and drag to rotate)

Apple has released Safari 4.0.2 for both Mac and Windows, which is available through either software update or through the Safari website.

The update addresses two security vulnerabilities and improves the stability of the Nitro JavaScript engine used by Safari and are described below:

• An issue in WebKit’s handling of the parent and top objects may result in a cross-site scripting attack when visiting a maliciously crafted website. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of parent and top objects.
• A memory corruption issue exists in WebKit’s handling of numeric character references. Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of numeric character references. Credit to Chris Evans for reporting this issue.

The update is recommended for all Safari users.

Apple has released an update to Safari for Mac only. The update “addresses incompatibilities between Safari 4.0 and certain features in iPhoto ’09, including Places and Facebook publishing”.

The update is available to Mac users through the software update menu in OS X.

Apple has released a press release stating that Safari 4 has been downloaded over 11 million times in just 3 days.

Breaking these down, there were 6 million downloads for Windows and 5 million downloads for Mac OS X.

To compare, Firefox 3 was downloaded 20 million times in 7 days, so the numbers from Apple seem quite reasonable.

Apple claims that Safari 4 is “nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3”.

Safari 4 can be downloaded for Windows and Mac from the Apple Safari website.

At today’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple announced the immediate availability of Safari 4 final for both Mac and PC.

Safari 4 contains over 150 new features, including a screen reader, basic HTML5 support, and a much improved JavaScript engine. A full list of new features can be found online.

The latest release is now the first browser not in beta to score a full 100% in Acid3 tests, which tests a browsers support for JavaScript and CSS3.

Safari 4 can be downloaded from the Apple Safari website.

Opera Mobile is now the most used mobile browser world wide according to SiteCounter for the month of May.

Opera Mobile took the lead for the month with 24.6% of the worldwide market compared to 22.3% for the iPhone. This statistic is a little misleading however, as with iPod touch added to the total, it comes to 37.32% market share.

Nokia came in third for the month with 17.9% market share.