When researchers at Net Applications studied web browser usage in November, they found that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is used by 69.77% of people surfing the web. At the beginning of the year, that figure was around 75%. Mozilla's Firefox browser took a big chunk of the market — 21%. Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome have grown to 7.13% and 0.83%, respectively. Turns out there's no one right way to live in the digital age.

While IE has been sliding and Firefox has been growing steadily for a while now, researchers believe this minor coup d'état occured in part because of the Thanksgiving holiday, high unemployment rates, and the U.S. elections that took place on November 4th. Because of those three situations users were more likely to spend time on their computers at home, where browsers other than IE are much more common. Many workplaces conservatively stick with IE since it comes with the Windows operating system and is the traditional standard. However, they say that trends indicate that Firefox will stay above 20% even after the dust has settled.

You can read this however you want, of course, but some folks are taking this as evidence of Microsoft's decline in power. The company's dominance of all things personal-computer related used to be indisputable, but increasing adoption of Firefox, a recent surge in Mac computer sales, and Google's web search success have raised eyebrows.

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