ReadWriteWeb is reporting that new numbers show Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is continuing to lose market share and soon may cease being the application of choice for most Web users. Even if that happens, IE would still be the most popular browser. But Microsoft has dominated this particular niche for a long time; the fact that they’re losing their grip on it is telling.

RWW claims that users are leaving IE for Safari (the default Mac Web browser), Firefox (the open source browser from the Mozilla foundation), and Chrome (Google’s recently unveiled browser). These are three very different lines of attack on Microsoft’s fortifications.

Safari is in a way comparable to IE—they’re both the default browser that comes with an operating system. This is sort of just PC vs Mac and isn’t really terribly interesting.

The other two, however, come from quite different places. Firefox is an open source alternative that is extremely popular among early adopter types. In fact, at this point it’s pretty popular among on-time adopters too, largely due to the fact that the early adopters evangelize so heavily in its favor. Microsoft might have marketing dollars, but it’s hard to fend off pervasive word-of-mouth promotion by people who tend to be tech influencers giving their friends and family earnest advice.

Chrome, on the other hand, comes from “the Microsoft of the Web”. Sort of. Google is certainly a major force and probably deserves the title, if for no other reason than for being the iconic computer company of this decade. That’s very different than the collaborative community around Firefox.

But one thing unites them: Both are geared towards a world where the Web isn’t just a series of documents, but an environment in which to work and interact. A lot of Web applications are social ones, but companies like Zoho and 37Signals are doing well selling productivity and organizational Web applications as services.

Microsoft seems to still be oriented towards a world in which activity happens on the desktop in applications other than the browser. But a lot of people seem to manage to live most of their digital life through that one application. Word processing (where Microsoft also has a great deal of hegemony) is a hold out in this territory, but Google has been working on their Google Docs offering to counter them there.

It’s multi-front conflict, to be certain. The way people interact with not just the Web but their computers more generally is at stake in the question of what form the browser takes (if it can even really be called that, considering how much goes on in there sometimes). But the moves being made by each side can be really pretty tiny. Example:

Google just announced new drag-and-drop functionality and folder simplification for the Gmail Web application. Along with that they are replacing this,

With this,

It’s important. Google’s extremely sparse and simple interface aesthetic isn’t for everyone. A lot of users, particularly the users they might be trying to win over, prefer the familiarity and comfort of more tactile button systems. I’d be willing to wager applications like Gmail and others start shedding the basic text links they use for navigation and controls for something that looks more like the second image. If Google can make Email and word processing in the browser feel more like the desktop versions people tend to be used to it will be that much easier to convert them to a situation (made possible with Chrome) in which everything they use comes from Google.

Well, except the computer itself and the operating system. But who even cares about those things these days?