Google saw, by far, the strongest growth in 2011, jumping a full 11 percentage points. Firefox completely stalled out after years of taking share from Microsoft, and Microsoft has just been slowly falling every years since 2003 when it hit a peak 93 percent share. For the year, Firefox lost 5.41 percentage points.
Safari, thanks to strong Mac sales, moved to over 6 percent share, its highest ever.
There is very little that can stop Mozilla's woes at this point, even though the company just received almost $1 billion (over three years) from Google to have the company's search engine remain the default option on all new downloads. The move is seen as a way for Google to avoid anti-trust issues in the future when Chrome eventually moves to majority market share.
Microsoft, which has greatly improved its browser over the past few years, is planning to use Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 to stop its declining market share into the future.