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Firefox owned an 8.27 per cent share of the browser market in August, says the firm, compared with September's 7.55 per cent, a drop of about 9 per cent. In fact Firefox's market share has been pretty much on a downward path since its June peak of 8.71 per cent.

NetApplications told InformationWeek that this is partly down to an anomaly caused by Netscape 8.0 which can draw pages using both IE's or the Firefox Gecko engine. For the most part it was

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identifying itself as a Firefox browser, bumping up the numbers. The latest version of Netscape however correctly tells sites which browser it is, hence the dampening effect on Firefox.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the other hand actually tightened its grip with a jump from 86.32 per cent to 86.87 per cent.

September is the back to school month, and with it comes the purchase of new computers for students. A surge of new systems on the Internet using the Windows default browser may go some way to explaining IE's slight renaissance.

IE will still find it tough getting back above 90 per cent, as its other rivals fared much better. Netscape rose incrementally from 2.02 to 2.16 per cent, but should be expected to do better once the effect of HP's decision to bundle the browser with its desktops and laptops kicks in.

iPod sales clearly are helping Apple to sell more computers, as the Mac's Safari browser share grew from 2.2 per cent to 2.39 per cent - around 8 per cent growth rate.

Opera's decision to go ad-free for free wasn't soon enough to help its September figures: down from 0.62 to 0.51 per cent.