Internet research firm Net Applications has somewhat stunning news: Windows share of the operating system has fallen below 90 percent according to the company for the first time since the mid 1990s. Furthermore, its share of the browser market has also fallen, now below 70 percent for the first time in nearly a decade.

IE now stands at 69.77 percent, down 1.5 percent or so from the previous month. Contrast this with Firefox, who now has about 20.8 percent of the market, up about .8 percent from the last month.

This has to have Redmond worried. I clearly remember pinging my Microsoft sources back a year or two ago when Mozilla really began to pick up market share. The response was “oh, they only expect them to peak at 15 or 20 percent and that will be it,” or something to that effect.

Well, we’ve now blown through that, and look to be poised for more gains. Firefox is beginning to move from the alternative to the competitor catagory when it comes to browsers. That’s something many — including Microsoft — did not expect.

The bad news doesn’t end there. Apple’s Mac OS is resurgent. It’s share is now up to 8.9 percent, the highest market share ever recorded by the firm for Apple. Contrast this with Microsoft, whos .8 percent drop to 89.6 percent was the biggest drop in over two years.

Vista’s adoption is still awful: only one in five users use it two years after it was released. While it has generally grown by about a percentage point each of the past few months, this shows that the computing public has generally given Microsoft’s latest OS the Windows Me treatment.

 
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Read more: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Macs, market share, PCs