Even with dire predictions about Apple hardware growth during the economic crisis, and the legitimate sales hit they have taken after the Microsoft Laptop Hunter ads, the recent numbers released by Net Applications Market Research show that Safari’s share of the browser market grew as much as that of Firefox, whereas Internet Explorer’s share has dropped almost 10%.

Internet Explorer has often alienated the web development community because of Microsoft’s unwillingness to adopt standards, and the big WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, iPhone Safari, Android browser) have shown huge growth as a group. While this is not indicative of OS X’s operating system share going up, because there is a Windows version as well, the trend has traditionally been that Safari growth went up at the same time that OS X market share grew. We will see what happens when the hugely anticipated Mac version of Google Chrome comes out.