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.

Themes are even closer for browser Google Chrome, with recent developer builds including theme support already.

TechCrunch has been able to confirm that themes will be available in an online gallery from Google themselves.

While some early themes have been around for a while, latest builds allow users to push themes out to the browser, with an easy option to revert to previous themes if the user desires.

No word on when this feature will make it into the public releases, but expect things to start speeding up.

After announcing that Windows 7 would ship in the European Union without Internet Explorer, Microsoft has done a back flip and will once again include the companies web browser.

Microsoft released the following statement:

In the wake of last week’s developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I’m pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world.

One reason we decided not to ship Windows 7 ‘E’ is concerns raised by computer manufacturers and partners. Several worried about the complexity of changing the version of Windows that we ship in Europe if our ballot screen proposal is ultimately accepted by the Commission and we stop selling Windows 7 ‘E’. Computer manufacturers and our partners also warned that introducing Windows 7 ‘E’, only to later replace it with a version of Windows 7 that includes IE, could confuse consumers about what version of Windows to buy with their PCs.

A ballot screen update is still said to be on the cards for all Windows XP, Vista and 7 European Users if the EU accepts Microsoft’s proposal.

It has been 4 and a half years in the making, but Firefox has finally surpassed 1 billion total downloads since Firefox 1.0 was first released.

Here are some other interesting milestone statistics:

• Firefox 1.0 is released on November 9, 2004, 1200 days ago.
• 100 million reached on October 19, 2005, 344 days later.
• 200 million reached on August 2, 2006, 287 days later.
• 300 million reached on February 12, 2007, 193 days later
• 400 million reached on September 7, 2007, 207 days later.
• 500 million reached today February 22, 2008, 168 days later.
• 1 billion reached today July 31, 2009.

Congratulations to the Firefox team and here’s to the next 1 billion!

Microsoft has confirmed that users of Windows Vista and Windows XP in the European Union will also be provided with a ballot screen of web browsers.

The change will be pushed out via Windows Update to all users in the EU.

“Microsoft will distribute a Ballot Screen software update to users within the EEA of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Client PC Operating Systems, by means of Windows Update as described hereafter: A software update enabling the Ballot Screen to be displayed will be made available to all current and future users of Windows XP and Windows Vista who receive updates from Windows Update. For Windows XP and Windows Vista users the Ballot Screen update will first be made available between 3 and 6 months after the adoption of the Commission’s decision.”

There is still no word on when the final decision will be made.

Hot on the heals of the Firefox 3.7 interface mock-ups, Firefox 4.0 mock-up designs have surfaced.

While the new Windows interface looks similar to that of Firefox 3.7, there are some slight differences, including an in-line refresh and stop button.

Two separate designs have been proposed, one with tabs above the address bar, and one with the tabs below the address bar as is currently the case. More screen shots are available after the jump.

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Microsoft has finally craved to pressure from the European Union, and instead of offering no browser in Windows 7 E in Europe, the company will offer a ballot screen which will allow users to choose a web browser.

This is a big win for consumers, with the EU acknowledging the decision. “The European Commission can confirm that Microsoft has proposed a consumer ballot screen as a solution to the pending antitrust case.”

“We believe that if ultimately accepted, this proposal will fully address the European competition law issues relating to the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows and interoperability with our high-volume products,” said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith.

A proposed ballot screen can be seen below:

Thanks to a new algorithm, Google is able to push out Chrome updates in one tenth of the size they used to.

This means that Chrome updates can be pushed out to more simultaneously, protecting users against threats faster than before.

An example has been given on the recent update from 190.1->190.4 on the development channel.

Google has pushed out Chrome 2.0.172.37 to users of the browser, patching two security holes.

The security holes would allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in the Google Chrome sandbox and even with the privileges of the logged on user.

Other changes include:

• Fix: Solving captcha images broken at orkut.com. (Issue15569)
• Make forward/backward navigation work even when redirection is involved. (Issue 9663, issue 10531)
• Fix: Daylight savings time not recognized for some CET locales. (Issue 12579)
• Fix a browser crash on closing a URL request. (Issue 8942)
• Update the V8 Javascript engine to version 1.1.10.14 to fix issues with regular expressions.
• Update Gears to the latest release, 0.5.25.0.

The update will be pushed out automatically to Chrome users.

For those that are still using Firefox 3, Mozilla has updated the browser to close 9 security holes, 4 of which were rated critical.

A full list of changes can be found in the release notes, and the update is recommended for all Firefox 3 users.

The update will be pushed out to existing Firefox 3 users in the next 24-48 hours or can be updated from the Help menu.