Microsoft’s venerable Internet Explorer browser lost its majority position last month, according to a Web metrics vendor, falling under the 50% bar for the first time since it thrashed Netscape Navigator and assumed control of the browser market.

By the estimates of Irvine, Calif.-based Net Applications, Internet Explorer (IE) ended 2015 with a user share — a measurement of unique visitors to the websites of the company’s clients, and one of the few proxies for real-world browser adoption — of 48.6%. That was a drop of 1.5 percentage points from November, the largest one-month contraction in IE’s share since October 2011.

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