Firefox nears 30% market share in Europe

17 Jul 2007

Europe is a fortress for Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser, which enjoys a market share nearly 50% higher than in the U.S., a French Web-measuring company reported today.

According to July data from XiTiMonitor, Firefox accounted for 27.8% of browsers used in Europe, an increase of 3.6 percentage points from the March measurement.

XiTiMonitor's survey of almost 96,000 sites in 32 European countries -- from Ireland to Ukraine, Finland to Greece -- also said Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer held a 66.5% market share, with Opera, Safari and Netscape rounding out the top five with 3.5%, 1.7% and 0.3%, respectively.

Slovenia, Finland and Slovakia had the greatest Firefox penetration, with the open-source browser accounting for 47.9%, 45.4% and 40.4%, respectively, during a weeklong stretch from July 2 to July 8. Other Firefox strongholds include Germany (38%), Poland (39.6%) and Ireland (38.6%).

By XiTiMonitor's tally, Firefox's North American market share was pegged at 18.7%, higher even than the worldwide number set by U.S.-based metric vendors. Net Applications, for instance, put Firefox's June global market share at 14.55%, which was off more than half a percentage point from March. XiTiMonitor, meanwhile, claimed that Firefox's share had climbed in every region.

SpreadFirefox, Mozilla's community marketing program, wasted no time in posting XiTiMonitor's numbers.

Source: Computer World

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