Net Applications released updated global browser market share numbers today, indicating that Internet Explorer is losing users at an accelerated pace. The browser’s share dropped from 69.77% in November to 68.15% in December.

Firefox gained more than half a point and ended up at 21.34%, Safari approaches the next big hurdle with 7.93% and Chrome came in at 1.04%, the first time Google was able to cross the 1% mark. Opera remained stable 0.71%.

Over the past 12 months, IE gave up 7.9 points of market share, while Firefox gained 4.5 points and Safari nearly 2.4 points.

Certainly the emergency fixes for security breaches is not making IE any more appealing to users.

I have used Firefox for a couple of years now and especially like the Sync capability that allows you to move your bookmarks and passwords between computers or as a backup in case your computer crashes as mine has on several occasions.