A report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share and that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS's on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis.

The report was released this week by net Applications and refers to the browser market share for January.

Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer (IE) remains in hte first place but Google's Chrome has been steadily gaining ground on the Web browsing software, according to the report.

Chrome's share of the browser market rose from 1.62 percent in March of last year to 5.22 percent last month.

During the same period, Internet Explorer's piece of the Web browser market dropped from 68.46 percent to 62.12 percent, Net Application reported.

The percentage of people using Safari browser software for Apple's Macintosh computers went from 3.63 percent in March of last year to 4.53 percent in January.



Microsoft claims that the success of its IE browser relies on the fact that IE8 offers users protection and privacy online. As of today, Internet Explorer 8 has done over 350 million malware blocks, according to Microsoft. In addition, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have blocked a total of over 125 million phishing sites.

Recently, organizations including Google have been recommending that people update their browsers and move off older versions, such as the nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft said that it supported this recommendation to move off Internet Explorer 6.