A new month means new Web browser statistics, the last of 2011. As we close out the year, Internet Explorer as a whole is down for the year, but the good news for Microsoft is that Internet Explorer 9 continues to gain ground on Windows 7, which is essentially the only OS the browser works with anyway.

In the grand scheme of things, 2011 hasn’t been all that kind to Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s browser has lost nearly 10 percent of its market share to finish the year with 52.64 percent of the market. Contrast that with Google’s Chrome–the big winner for 2011–which has gained more than seven percentage points and is poised to overtake Firefox as the second-place browser. Actually, by some measures Chrome is already number two.