February 2, 2009 (AppScout) Internet Explorer’s market share continued to drop last month as Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari saw small gains, according to data released Monday by Net Applications.

Microsoft’s IE held on to the top spot, with 67.55 percent of the browser market, though that was down 0.06 percent from last month and down 7.92 percent from the same time last year.

Firefox came in at No. 2 with 21.53 percent market share–up 0.19 percent from December and up 4.55 percent from last year.

Safari, Chrome, and Opera rounded out the top five with 8.29 percent, 1.12 percent, and 0.70 percent of the market, respectively.

Google released its Chrome browser in September and snapped up about 0.78 percent of the market. It managed to knock Opera out of the number four spot, but has grown only incrementally since its debut.

Firefox jumped four percentage points last July after the release of 3.0, and reached the 20 percent threshold in November.

AppScout