Firefox Takes A Big Bite Out Of Internet Explorer In Europe
Despite vast improvements to Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s flagship browser continues to lose ground to Mozilla’s Firefox — especially in Europe. According to a new study (translated) by XiTiMonitor, a French internet monitoring firm, Firefox has made dramatic gains in browser market share in Europe throughout the past year with a fairly dramatic upswing in Firefox usage over the past four months.
The study, which looked at roughly 96,000 websites during the first week in July, found that Firefox had 27.8 percent market share across Europe while IE held 66.5 percent. The remaining share is made up of other browsers like Apple’s Safari and Opera.
The rise in Firefox usage is even more dramatic in individual countries, particularly Slovenia (47.9 percent) and Finland (45.4 percent) where Firefox is basically on par with Internet Explorer.
Perhaps the most disturbing news for Microsoft is that even in markets where IE continues to dominate users have been slow to upgrade to the latest version IE7. Another study by XiTiMonitor reveals that only about on third of IE users have upgraded to the latest version.
In fact Firefox 2 has a greater market share than IE7 in 17 European countries.
[via Slashdot]
