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Internet Explorer still dominates the landscape with a recorded global usage of 85.45 per cent. In contrast to Microsoft's browser, however, which saw a 1.18 percent decline since the end of April, the open source browser saw its usage share increase, up 2.82 per cent.

Last month, research firms reported Firefox was actually losing share, possibly because of a change in the way the new Netscape browser identified itself. However, it appears that was just a glitch.

'The global usage share

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of Mozilla's browsers is still growing and it seems that Netscape users and some Internet Explorer users are switching to the Firefox version,' said the co-founder of OneStat.com, Niels Brinkman. 'It also looks like that browser users of Internet Explorer for Apple's Mac are switching to Safari because the global usage share is still growing.'

Behind the leaders come Apple's Safari (1.75 per cent), Netscape (0.26) and Opera (0.77).

The company has also broken down its figures on a UK basis. Here, IE records 93.37 per cent, Firefox 4.94 per cent, Safari 0.99 per cent, Netscape 0.23 per cent and Opera 0.39 per cent.

OneStat monitors, on a browser basis, the Internet users that arrive at sites using one of its services. The research, it states, is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.

Last month we reported that Firefox had passed another download milestone - 100m surfers hunt down Firefox. A version 1.5 release is expected later this Autumn (Firefox 1.5 RC1 is currently with testers).