October has come and gone, so Microsoft is back with its monthly evaluation of how well Internet Explorer is doing in the market. As with past months, the same general themes repeat again in October: While overall IE share is down a bit, share of IE 9, particularly on Windows 7, is up. As always, the commentary is based on numbers provided by NetApplications.

"The good news is that with IE9 at almost 35% share on Windows 7 in the US near the close of October - now 65% of all Windows 7 users in the US have a modern browser!" Microsoft's Roger Capriotti wrote in a blog post. "Worldwide, the numbers are looking good. IE9 is growing nicely and is on path to be the leading modern browser on Windows 7 behind IE8 as early as next month."

Looked at graphically, IE 9 has significantly more usage share than Chrome 14+15 and Firefox 7, the latest versions, respectively, of those browsers. In fact, it has more share than all three of those combined.

Worldwide on Windows 7, IE 9 appears to be poised to surpass the usage share of all versions of Firefox, and run fairly even with the usage share of all versions of Chrome. Not too shabby.

Of course, not everyone runs Windows 7. And one should reasonable expect the broader tech press to focus on the fact that IE continues to lose share, albeit it slowly, overall. For this statistic, we must turn to NetApplications, since Microsoft doesn't highlight it in their own blog post. And what we discover there is that IE, overall, has 52.63 percent usage share, down from 54.93 in September. In the same time period, Firefox usage was up a tiny bit (I'd call it "flat") and Chrome usage jumped (from 16.20 percent to 17.62 percent).