Net Applications has published its browser statistics for the month of March. was officially launched on the evening of Monday, March 14, and Firefox 4 wasn't available until about a week later, on March 22, so this month's results don't necessarily paint a full or fair picture of how those browsers are faring thus far.

First, let's just take a look at the Net Applications . Looking at the global data, Chrome and Safari are the big winners with gains of 0.64 and 0.25 percentage points respectively. Firefox eeked up 0.06 percentage points, while Internet Explorer fell 0.85 percentage points to a new low for the Microsoft browser.

It is hard to try and spin those numbers from the perspective of IE9 and Firefox 4. Net Applications puts the current Firefox 4 share at 1.68 percent, with IE9 lagging behind at 1.04 percent--up from 0.63 and 0.59 respectively last month for the beta or release candidate (RC) versions. Certainly, the larger month over month gain for Firefox 4 is a contributing factor, but the real issue behind the general decline of Internet Explorer seems to be the 0.54 percentage point drop in IE8--the first loss for that browser in its history.

Now, let's slice and dice the stats a little. There has been a fairly public debate between Ryan Gavin and the Internet Explorer team, and Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla camp. Asa and I also exchanged some tweets in relation to the spin on the launch day figures, and my article . The crux of both debates comes down to whether IE9 is measured against the browser ecosystem as a whole, or whether it is viewed strictly as a since those are the .

Narrowing the results to just the United States, and just the Windows operating system the picture shifts some in Microsoft's favor. In the US, across all versions of Windows, Internet Explorer as a whole gained share by 0.19 points to 72.44 percent, while Chrome and Firefox both declined--by 0.10 and 0.08 percentage points respectively.