Chicago (IL) – Time for a mid-month browser market share update: All major browser give up average daily market share in the first half of the month, Chrome settles well below 1% and Microsoft’s recently released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 shows its impact, but has trouble making up for the losses of older IE browsers.     

Daily browser market share data published by Net Applications indicates that recent releases of beta browser software, most notably Google’s Chrome browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 attract substantial interest from users, but have yet to show their long term impact on the industry.

Microsoft’s IE 8share was boosted by the release of beta 2 and has increased from 0.23% at the beginning of this month to 0.41% today. However, the launch was almost disappointing hen compared to Google’s Chrome 0.2 browser which reached 1.16% on September 4, but since then has settled well below 1%: The average for the month was 0.79%, exactly today’s market share estimate by Net Applications.          

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Armada continues to dominate the browser market with an average of 0.31% for IE8, 46.38% for IE7 and 24.08% for IE6 (IE5 and earlier versions are estimated at less than 0.05%). Microsoft’s total for the first half of the month is an average of 70.82%, which is down from 72.15% in August.

Firefox was also down with an H1 September average of 19.38% for Firefox 3, Firefox 2 and Firefox 1. But while there appears to be a sharp decline from the 19.73% average in August, Firefox usage share posts substantial spikes above 20%. For example the most recent daily estimate puts the Firefox trio at 21.17%. Microsoft’s daily averages also have spikes by about 2%, but dip well below the 70% - for example to 68.08% on September 1.

However, it should be noted that even Microsoft IE6 has 24% more market share (4.70 points) than all Firefox browsers combined.   

Safari is the silent browser in this battle and also showed a visible decline in the first half of September: The average share was 6.09% (Safari 3 and Safari 3.1), whereas it is apparent that Safari users are quickly upgrading to new browser versions – Safari 3.1  stands at 5.36% and Safari 3.0 at 0.73%.   

Combined, IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome make up almost 96% of the browser market.