Market research firm, Net Applications, has released its latest browser share trend report, showing that as of September Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) commands a 54.39% share of the global browser usage pie.

As with IE, Mozilla’s Firefox is experiencing a slow and steady decline in user figures, but still comes in second with 22.48%, whilst on-the-rise Google Chrome rounds up the top three, claiming a 16.2% stake of the browser market worldwide. Apple’s Safari browser handles the web browsing duties on 5.02% of computer users from around the globe, whilst Opera Software’s Opera browser claims a 1.67% stake in the browser market.  

In a blogpost on Microsoft’s official The Windows Blog, the company’s director of Internet Explorer product marketing, Roger Capriotti, provided further details concerning IE usage. Since September, the Redmond-based company’s latest browser Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) now commands a 31% share of the browser usage pie for PCs operating on Windows 7 in the US, and a 22.1% stake in terms of the usage share on Windows 7 globally.

This compares favourably to the latest version (Chrome 14) of Google’s Chrome, used as the browser of choice on 12.7% on Windows 7-running PCs in the States and 18.1% worldwide. For the newest versions (Firefox 6 & 7) of Firefox, the US Windows 7 browser usage figure is 12.6%, whilst the global usage Windows 7 figure is 15.7%.

“Another great trend is the sharp drop of IE6 as more people move towards modern browsers.  IE6 has now dropped to 9% usage share worldwide in September (and if you remove China’s figures, IE6 only represents 3.5% usage share worldwide),” Capriotti also noted.

In browser related news Google’s Chrome browser recently became a victim of Microsoft’s in house anti-virus product, Security Essentials, when it incorrectly identified Chrome as being malware.