Internet Explorer has been steadily losing ground to its competitors for quite some time now, and today Microsoft’s default Windows browser was overtaken by Firefox in the European front. According to analytics company StatCounter, Firefox share of the European market this December was 38.11%, compared to IE’s 37.52%.

“It’s the first time that IE has been knocked out of the number one position in a major geographical area, says Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s CEO, who points to the growth of Google’s Chrome as the reason for the shift. It isn’t that Firefox is gaining steam, but rather than IE is losing users to Chrome.”

Firefox’s win over IE is attributed to Chrome for a good reason; Google’s contribution to the browser war is up from 5.06% in December 2009 to 14.58% in December 2010.

Nonetheless, despite of IE’s slow descent on the European front, the browser has seen an increase in popularity with over 10 million downloads of IE9 beta, which we covered here. The browser war continues on other fronts as well, and while Firefox won the role of IBM’s default browser, IE has recently made some of its biggest gains to date, which we covered earlier here.

Internet Explorer is still slowly losing ground though, and our Editor in Chief Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins discussed an infographic which described how IE is just about as unpopular as Chrome is and is the least talked-about browser with only a 13.6% share of the buzz.