Firefox is losing ground against rivals such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari in the browser market war.

Net Applications, which tracks the worldwide market shares of Web browsers, said that Internet Explorer and Safari enjoyed an increase in market shares in July, while Firefox suffered a fall.

As per revealed figures, Internet Explorer’s market share jumped from 60.32 per cent in June to settle at 60.74 per cent in July. Earlier in May, Internet Explorer’s market share had slipped to 59.69 per cent.

Safari saw its market share jumped from 4.85 per cent June to 5.09 in July.

On the other hand, Firefox saw its market share slumped month-on-month in July; however, Firefox 3.6 reported a jump from 15.99 per cent in June to 16.15 in July. Firefox claims millions of downloads, but one can bet that Firefox’ usage is not close to the number of downloads.

One of the many reasons behind Firefox’s falling market share is that users often have to download and install extensions for common Web gadgetry such as Flash or PDF. Why these extensions are not included by default, if they are essential for a rich Web experience.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has responded to a report that claims it slashed Internet Explorer 8's privacy architecture unduly in favor of advertisers and marketers online.

Earlier, a report emerged claiming that the development team for Internet Explorer 8, led by GM Dean Hachamovitch, planned a feature that would block any 3rd party content found on over ten websites since it would most probably be tracking software. This would be created into the start-up wizard so that everyone would see it.

The result was that InPrivate Filtering is now to be turned on by the user rather than being activated automatically.