The July browser market share report is out from Net Market Share, and it shows Microsoft Internet Explorer still holding a majority of the market share, though that percentage is declining.

The July market share for all versions of IE is at 52.71 percent, down from 53.68 percent last month, and 60.74 percent a year ago, according to Net Market Share, which tracks key Internet tech usage market share.

Mozilla Firefox (at 21.47 percent in July) and Opera (at 1.65 percent) both saw small monthly and year-to-year share declines. But Google Chrome is up to 13.46 percent from 7.16 percent last year, and Apple Safari is up to 8.1 percent from 5.09 percent last year.

Ars Technica predicts that this means IE, though still the dominant browser, is going to lose its majority position by the end of the year.

Two-and-a-half years after Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's next entry in the increasingly competitive Web browser market, Internet Explorer 8, is ready to go. The final version of IE8 is due to be available at 9 a.m. Thursday here.

A new, modern browser couldn't come a moment sooner for Microsoft.

Internet Explorer's share of the Web browser market has steadily eroded from more than 90 percent in late 2004 to less than 70 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to data from Net Applications. In that time, Firefox has skyrocketed from about 4 percent to more than 21 percent of the market. Apple's Safari browser has also increased from less than 2 percent to more than 8 percent of the market.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer drew attention to the issue during his February strategic update with Wall Street analysts.

"[W]ith IE8 we are very focused in on a set of technology marketing programs, et cetera, to regain browser share," Ballmer said. "We think that browser share is important. Browsers are not commodity. Browsers are key features of operating systems, and we have a lot of work that we need to do in that dimension."

Microsoft has packed a lot of new features into IE8, some of which even have Firefox cheering.

With last week's release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, and today's Chrome browser from Google, the Web browser has been front and center in tech circles. Here's a collection of links and to help answer a few questions I've received from readers and to put the Google vs. Microsoft vs. Firefox vs. Safari browser rumble in context.

Read my story about Microsoft releasing a second test version of its next Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, here. Get it and try it yourself here.

For some added perspective, I talked with Mike Shaver, a founding member of Mozilla, maker of Firefox. He's currently interim vice president of engineering. Rather than gloating about the success of the browser and the 15-plus points of market share Firefox has taken from IE in the last four years, he was glad to see Microsoft speeding up improvements to its own browser: