YNOT – According to new data released by analytics company Net Applications, Microsoft’s market-leading Web browser Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop by 5% over the past ten months, while Google’s 3-year-old Chrome browser saw an increase of 6% during that same period. Meanwhile market share for Mozilla’s Firefox browser has remained relatively flat, seeing only modest drops.

At the current pace of decline, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is expected to lose its position as the majority browser in June of 2012, when its share of the browser market could drop below 50%. Current trends also see a likelihood of Chrome passing Firefox as the second most popular browser at approximately the same time Microsoft falls below the 50% line.

Microsoft’s Director of IE Marketing, Roger Capriotti, declined to speculate about what specifically it might mean if Internet Explorer usage dropped below 50% next year.

“I wouldn’t call that a milestone,” said Capriotti. “And I wouldn’t call it irrelevant either.”

For years it has been Firefox that enjoyed the status of the chief alternative to Internet Explorer, but for the moment it appears to be Google’s Chrome, not Firefox, which is seeing most of the spoils from Microsoft’s decline. In the past year Chrome has seen its share jump to 15.5% of the market, while also posting a 1.5% jump in August alone. Firefox meanwhile slid two-tenths of a percent in August to 22.6% of the market.

Also notable on the browser front is Apple’s Safari browser, which has held steady recently at 4.6% market share. The Opera browser has also held steady with less than 2% of the market.

The picture looks very different though when focusing on browsers for mobile devices. Net Applications data separates desktop data from mobile/tablet data.

“The combination of mobile and tablet usage has continued to rise dramatically and is now over 6 percent (and growing at an accelerating pace) of all browsing on the Internet,” explained a researcher at Net Applications. “Because of this rise, mixing the device types reduced the value of the data.”

Apple’s Safari browser dominates mobile browsing, accounting for a 53% share that is fueled by the company’s iPhone, iPod and iPad devices.