NEWS
Mozilla's web browser, Firefox, is becoming increasingly popular, gaining on average an extra 3.1 per cent of the market in 32 European countries in the past four months, according to French web-monitoring company XiTi Monitor.
Since its launch Firefox has been steadily gaining market share from the dominant browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). In the first week of July 2006, Firefox had 21.1 per cent of the market. In the first week of July 2007, Firefox held 27.8 per cent of the European market, according to XiTi Monitor's report.
Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, said: "It's a nice way to get started on a Monday morning. I hope we continue to gain market share, as our goal is to promote choice. Monopoly leads to lack of innovation."
Although Microsoft still has 66.5 per cent of the browser market across Europe, in certain countries Firefox has now become very popular - especially in Eastern Europe. In Slovenia, Firefox has 47.9 per cent of the market, while the browser now has over 39 per cent market share in Poland, Hungary and Croatia.
Nitot said that a major contributory factor for Firefox's success in countries like Slovenia and Poland was the support network that exists in them.
He said: "There's a very active community there - there's active forum support online. Also, if you have a problem, people from the community will come to your business and fix any potential issues."
Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Try Opera - a much better option
2. Richard
Which O/S Platforms?
It would be interesting to see which operating systems are being used in the different countries.
For example, how many of these Firefox users are running it on Linux?
3. Joe Whitehead
Opera is ok but sometimes I need 'heavy' browser like IE or the Mozilla variants.
I love how Opera has a lighter footprint, supports easy use of 'saved sessions' although Mozilla has a similar feature, and how you can customize exactly what 'features' you want to disable. Don't like redirects but want rest of scripting? It's a lot easier in Opera.
I'm believing the predictions of almost anyone who's taken an economics class, is coming true. IE and Mozilla(or Firefox/etc.) are coming close to parity. There a lot of people who really don't care which browser, and once shown Mozilla, actually like that it doesn't support Active X spyware, etc. Not that I'm saying any browser is bulletproof! ;)
Since both of the most popular browsers are free and have almost the same user experience, there's going to come a point where for a while, we'll probaly see little growth relative to each other. The only really noticable costs are the time needed to get them configured (read: secured/customized), which is part of why IE's been losing so much of it's dominance. Realisticly, I keep IE/Mozilla/Opera on my laptop in case one of them works better on a site. I don't consider them to be exclusive.