by , 1:45 PM EDT, July 1st, 2008

Apple's Safari Web browser has been gaining market share for the past two months, and is continuing to hit new highs. Safari managed to jump up from 6.25 percent of the browser market in May to 6.31 percent in June, according to data from Market Share.

Safari spent most of 2007 grabbing a bigger piece of the Web browser market, but spent the first four months of 2008 on a plateau around the 5.8 percent mark.

In comparison, Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser has been gradually declining compared to its position last year while Firefox has been slowly gaining market share.

Internet Explorer has dipped to a new all time low with a still dominant 73.01 percent of the market. Firefox, on the other hand, has managed to steadily chip away at Microsoft's lead moving up from a 16.98 percent market share in January to 19.03 percent in June.

While the statistics are handy for getting snapshot overviews of a particular Web browser's popularity, looking at the numbers over time offers a better impression of overall popularity. In this case, the numbers seem to indicate a growing interest in Safari and Firefox at the expense of Internet Explorer.