The latest browser market share statistics are out from Web analytics firm Net Applications, and of all the browsers, only Google's Chrome made any kind of notable gain.

Chrome bumped up its position from 7.52 percent in August to nearly 8 percent in September, which is more than twice the market share it held one year ago.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continued to slip, dropping from 60.40 percent to 59.65 percent in that same time frame. Both Firefox and Opera held steady by increasing their share a nominal 0.03 and 0.02 percent, respectively, while Apple's Safari browser continued its slow but steady climb, rising from 5.16 percent to 5.27 percent.

Released in the middle of September, Microsoft's IE9 Beta accounted for 0.25 percent of browser usage in the last two weeks of the month.

If you go by market share alone, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the most popular browser on the planet, followed by Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome. But when you hone in on power users, the landscape starts to change. Suddenly, Firefox becomes the most used browser around, or so we thought.

Lifehacker gathered up some interesting data on the computing habits of over 40,000 puportedly tech savvy computer users, and what they found is that Chrome "has won over Firefox's core user base."

Lifehacker's poll asked readers to indicate their current browser of choice, 42.27 percent of which said it was Chrome. Firefox came in second at 33.33 percent, and what's remarkable about this is that Firefox was previously favored at 57 percent compared to Chrome's 21 percent when Lifehacker asked the same question a year ago.

Why the shift? Any number of reasons, Lifehacker says, who points out that you can install and start using Chrome extensions without a browser restart. Frequent browser updates, browser sync, and tight integration with Google are all reasons why Chrome users may prefer using the lightweight (and also extensible, just like Firefox, just with less add-ons) browser.

Outside of work, where you may be forced to use one browser over the other, what's your browser of choice? Hit the jump and tell us!

Mozilla was quick to release a couple of new versions of Firefox -- version 3.6.10 and version 3.5.15 -- just one day after turning off update notfications to address a bug that was causing headaches for some people.

The bug, which seemingly popped out of nowhere, caused the browser to crash during launch. It wasn't something that was detected in pre-release versions.

"Interesting that this doesn't show up in the top 300 crashes in 3.6.9pre or 3.5.12pre," Christian Legnitto, Firefox release manager, said in a bug comment.

Later on, Legnitto said that even though this caused a spike in the number of Firefox crashes, it was still a "drop in the bucket vs. active daily users." Nevertheless, "because it is a crash on start-up that could prevent people from using Fireofx entirely, we feel it was best to get a fix out quickly."

You can grab the latest version here (3.6.10) or here (3.5.13), or hit the "Check for updates" option in Firefox's Help menu.