Net Applications is reporting that IE8 has quietly, yet quickly ascended to over 3% usage market share.

Microsoft has not been actively marketing the new browser yet, but the market share is notable so early in the browser lifecycle (the browser was released on 3-19-2009). It may not matter much overall, however, as IE continues its downward trend. IE captured 66.82% of browser market share in March 2009, down from 71.27% just six months ago.

So far this year, browser market share for Firefox has been 22.05%, Safari comes in at 8.20%, Chrome comes in at a disappointing 1.17%, followed by Opera (0.70%) and Netscape (0.66%).