Business customers have resisted moving away from IE6 in many cases, even though the browser is well out of date and full of security holes. The reliance on IE6 to run specific applications may even be stalling upgrades from . 

Capriotti claimed progress on this front, saying commercial usage of IE6 is down to 10.3%, "an all-time low," and significantly lower than the overall IE6 market share of 13.66%.

"As we continued to dig deeper into the data, we were pleased to see that the IE6 usage patterns are consistent regardless of the number of seats in the organization and independent of the host operating system," he writes. "Small to medium sized organizations lead the pack in moving off of IE6, but even the largest enterprises with over 50,000 seats show similar trends – just 12.1% of web browsing in those organizations comes from IE6. While XP usage contributes to IE6 usage, the vast majority of commercial XP machines have already upgraded to IE7 or IE8. Less than 20% of web browsing on commercial XP machines comes from IE6."

Commercial usage of IE8, meanwhile, is up to 34.1% and, overall, "IE8 usage worldwide grew 0.74% in month of November," he writes. IE's decline must therefore be attributed to users ditching IE6 and IE7 for competing browsers such as Google Chrome.

Firefox also lost share in November, dropping from 22.83% to 22.75%. The only major non-Google browser to pick up share across all versions was Apple's Safari, which moved from 5.36% to 5.55%.