The guys at Mozilla Firefox have a lot to be cheerful about this holiday season — it was announced earlier this week that Firefox 3.5, Mozilla’s latest browser offering, has overtaken Internet Explorer 7.0 as the world’s most widely-used browser, capturing 22% of the browser market.

The news comes off the heels of news earlier this month that Firefox had overtaken IE in overall use in Germany. While Internet Explorer as a whole still leads the worldwide browser market with a 55% share, Mozilla has increased their own chunk of the market to 32% and has been steadily gaining ground on Microsoft.

Meanwhile, IE’s own latest browser offering, IE 8.0, is still neck and neck with Firefox 3.5 with a 20% market share. Both companies have seen a decline in their last-generation browsers, seemingly after users upgraded to the newer versions.

What about Google’s Chrome? Based on the buzz, it’s creeping up on Firefox as well, offering more flexibility and faster boot-up times. Whether or not it will surpass IE as well remains to be seen.

Via: Read Write Web