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Firefox Usage Climbing In Europe

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jan 17, 2006 05:08 PM
from the moving-on-up dept.
Mozilla The Internet
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is reporting that, according to the most recent set of statistics from Web monitoring firm XiTi, Mozilla's most popular brower is now the browser of choice for one in five of Europe's surfers, at least at home. The fact that all the measurements were taken on a Sunday means that the figure isn't accurate for the whole market, though, since business PCs tend to have lower Firefox usage rates." From the article: "Other Web metrics companies produce more conservative estimates of Firefox' market share. In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK."
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[+] IE Dropping, Now Near 70% In Europe 184 comments
Kevin Spiritus lets us know that XiTi Monitor, a French Web survey institute, has published its browser barometer for July, and Internet Explorer continues to lose ground. "The ascension of Firefox continues... Nearly 28% average use rate in Europe in the beginning of July 2007, with a progression in the totality of the 32 European countries studied. Firefox doesn't loose ground in any of the countries."
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  • Oh well... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Renegade Lisp (315687) * on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:11PM (#14494496)
    There's a famous statistic on browser usage [w3schools.com] at w3schools.com, which is a decidedly pro-Microsoft site. They have Firefox at close to 25% in recent months, and they were quick to add a comment that this is probably not representative, because w3schools visitors are likely quite interested in the technology and likely to try out alternatives to the browser that comes installed with their operating system. Interesting, though, that most of those who do try it out seem to stick with it...
    • This is something I've been wondering for a long time. I heard that on slashdot, Firefox is running at about 90% (IIRC, it was a user comment, so may not be accurate), but then we get these 11% figures. Everyone I know uses Firefox. People at every local buisness I've been to use it.
      My college requires people install it when they connect to the internet (and most of 'em use it once they've tried it).

      So, where are the hordes of IE fanboys trying to kill off Firefox? Anyone have a more accurate number? I

      • So, where are the hordes of IE fanboys...
        I'd say, in the UK (where I am and where the article was saying Firefox was trailing behind) they are mainly in places were the user is forced to user a certain well-known browser (despite, maybe, preferring something better) due to slow organisations (or the slow IT departments thereof) who don't like change.

        I'm, in particular, thinking of the public sector here (libraries, schools, universities, colleges, council and government offices) where MSIE is nearly always the only browser and the idea that one could do anything on the Internet not using MSIE and OE alone can be met with shock (even by the IT folks).

        For instance my local library say they have a policy of not installing any software not from Microsoft for security reasons, and my local FE & HE college say the same. The director of IT at the college (where I'm glad to say I no longer go but I know people who still do and it hasn't changed) tells students who ask to use Firefox that it, I quote, "is a hacking [sic] tool like `Kuhzuh' [sic]" and makes it clear that running it off a USB dongle will get your account removed. From my experience and that of friends, universities tend to be more sympathetic to user choice but may be slow in getting around to actually installing Firefox across their networks (as in they've been meaning to install it since before 1.0 but haven't got around to it yet).

        Although it is probably partly home users (esp. who use the WWW infrequently), most even totally computer-illiterate people who use the Internet any significant amount who I know seem to have converted on their own machines, so I see that is a much less significant problem.

        • Why Firefox isn't used much by businesses (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @10:01PM (#14496438)
          I'd say, in the UK ... they are mainly in places were the user is forced to user a certain well-known browser ... due to slow organisations (or the slow IT departments thereof) who don't like change.

          I don't think that's fair at all. I love Firefox, but using it at the office sucks. The senior developers love their security to such an extent that their browser is useless for using the intranet at work. At home, I can choose not to use sites with ActiveX or whatever, and frankly I've never found this a problem. At work, I have no choice, and it's a showstopper.

          The problem attitude is exemplified by the mess that is CAPS, introduced in Firefox 1.5. We used to be able to set a single preference in about:config to stop Firefox blocking links to local files. Now you have to set a whole range of options, and the senior devs are deliberately not advertising the equivalent of the old option because for some reason they think this will help us. Their super-new, highly-configurable system apparently can't handle the single most obvious configuration -- allow unchecked access only to machines on my own network -- or if it can, the docs are so cryptic that a whole group of us who looked, all experienced Firefox users, couldn't work out how to do it in ten minutes without basically listing every machine explicitly in the CAPS entry.

          In any case, the result is the same either way: a well known problem for many business users [mozillazine.org] remains inadequately addressed, Firefox developers continue to think they're doing the world a favour, and businesses continue to consider Firefox substandard regardless of its other merits. The solution is easy, but first the senior developers have to accept that they don't know their users' requirements better than their users.

    • Re:Oh well... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by GmAz (916505)
      You know, I have tried Firefox, Opera and many other different browsers. Even Netscape. But I still use IE. It has rather good pop-up blocking and it loads within what, a second. I personally don't like tabbed browsing. No matter what browser I try, I never stick with them. So if you are looking for IE fanboys, here is one.
      • Is browser loading time really that big an issue , as compared to say page loading time ?

        Here is how I rank various browsers based on criteria

        • Easy on eyes :- Konqueror,IE,Opera,Firefox. Konqueror has hands down the best font rendering, especially for non english fonts UTF or otherwise.
        • Add ons/Customizability :- Come on FF hands down, there is not even a distant second in this.
        • Rendering Speed :- Opera by a large margin. FF is the slowest in this dept.
        • Displaying non standard website, funcky javascripts et

      • Re:Oh well... (Score:5, Informative)

        by MikeFM (12491) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @06:08PM (#14495054) Homepage Journal
        You must not be a developer. IE is incredibly limiting in what you can do with your site designs and is annoyingly poorly standardized. Not only does it not follow a real standard it doesn't set it's own standard either as major changes happen between different versions of IE and are never fully documented. The IE standard is mostly whatever people can figure out by fighting to make things work in IE. So long as you're using plain HTML and don't mind rather ugly pages it's not a big deal but if you want nice looking pages and advanced features Firefox and Safari are the only contenders.
            • For the most part Firefox installs it's own updates unless you're using some ancient version or somehow disable updating. ;)

              The 1.0 series is only ancient if you've been following the alphas and betas. 1.5 final -- with automatic updates -- has been out for less than two months.

              Prior to that, all Firefox did for updates was put a red circle in your toolbar and hope you'd notice it.

              • Re:Oh well... (Score:4, Informative)

                by MikeFM (12491) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @07:24PM (#14495679) Homepage Journal
                The 1.5 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird are self-updating. It seems to work pretty well so far. We'll see if there are issues the auto updates can't handle. Probably some bugs since it's a new feature but it's a really good idea I think. The apps and any installed extensions will be updated as needed unless you turn updates off.

                I still think IE should just repackage Firefox as IE7. Easier, totally legal, and they can give users their expected look and feel with improved security, features, and standards support of FF. Seems a good idea to me at least.

    • Re:Uh, no. (Score:4, Informative)

      by msloan (945203) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:49PM (#14494875)
      w3schools is most definitly not pro microsoft. Wherever did you get a silly idea like that? It'd make more sense for them to be pro firefox anyway, hs just look at the css documentation on the site - most of the cool stuff is supported by firefox but not ie of any version.

      • w3schools is most definitly not pro microsoft. Wherever did you get a silly idea like that?

        "Pro-Microsoft" doesn't mean "Microsoft-only". I'm referring to a Microsoft-leaning bias on their site, which is always difficult to pin down to any single statement, but here's a number of observations:

        • w3schools features many Microsoft technologies very prominently, such as VBScript, .NET, ASP.
        • While they do feature server-side technology such as ASP, they don't mention any non-Microsoft server-side technology

    • W3School has a point (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm tracking browser and platform trends on a big Canadian government Web site. Firefox has an average of 9.21% of the market and is growing. Home usage is 14.72%. As we all know, browser types can easily be spoofed, but this at least gives you a hint on that W3School is pointed out the fact about its figures. And yes, I'm using Firefox myself, both at home and at work.

  • Europe? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by romiir (874939) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:17PM (#14494556)
    Last I checked, Firefox useage is increasing everywhere, not just in europe... When something makes sense, it grows in use quickly.

    Also, downloads don't count all the uses, I know in my work enviroment, we downloaded it once, but its on over 500 machines.
    • I part time as supporter on the dorm network, and I install FF from a burned CD, as IE sometimes has problems even connecting to the dorm network.

    • Re:Europe? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:25PM (#14494653)
      Yeah, but Europe is leading with a usage 20.11%

      I wonder why the poster didn't link to the original study:
      http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement13.asp [xitimonitor.com]

      They also mention that they made the measurement on a monday too without a notable difference.

        • Re:Europe? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Yokaze (70883) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @06:09PM (#14495058)
          Mon dieux, how do I convert French percentages into English ones? And all those strange nations. What is this Autriche again, isn't that some Techno group?

  • Business usage (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dystopian Rebel (714995) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:20PM (#14494603) Journal
    The fact that all the measurements were taken on a Sunday means that the figure isn't accurate for the whole market, though, since business PCs tend to have lower Firefox usage rates.


    In the original French article, they do say that there is a little variation in Europe between the browser statistics on Sunday and those during the week, due to the tendency of businesses to be wary (of what they don't understand).

    Look at the chart at the bottom of this page:
    http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement12.asp [xitimonitor.com]

    The variation is notable but not very much.

    • Re:Business usage (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Valdrax (32670) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:24PM (#14494645)
      Actually, I find the variation to be very encouraging. Winning the home users is a powerful accomplishment. The past history of the PC has been that what people use at work is what they end up using at home due to familiarity. If people are increasingly using Firefox at home in spite of being forced to use IE at work (as is the case with many jobs) then Firefox is in fact doing better than work time statistics would suggest.

      On the other hand, it could be that the difference is not between work and home but between the kind of people who would web surf on Sunday instead of going to church or visiting family.

      • Winning the home users is a powerful accomplishment.

        ... I only know a couple of people who don't use firefox. My guess is that, now that it has traction, we're going to see its usage increase significantly, as people just get fed up with IE, and the new converts go out and introduce others to the circle.

        Besides, when Vista finally comes out, that's pretty much the end of the line for Microsoft in the home market anyway ...

  • What really matters ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:21PM (#14494607) Homepage Journal
    ... is not the precise market share, but that the market share is big enough so that sites can't afford to be IE-only any more. I really don't care if the market share of Firefox (and other Mozilla browsers) is 10%, 25%, or even 50% -- what I care about is that the sites I need to go to are standards-compliant and don't rely on crap like ActiveX. Ideally, I'd like to see several major browsers, using several different rendering engines, and a host of minor ones, none having more than 50%, all rendering sites that conform to W3C standards reasonably well, all competing with each other. Doesn't seem like too much to ask.
    • I second this comment. Firefox is good and all that stuff, but what FF is really achieved (and I send really big THANK YOU to FF both teams - devs and marketing project guys) is that WWW standards is again taken seriosly. Just for notice, I have page in workings with rather much CSS and positioning - guess what - FF, Mozilla, Safari (newest one), Camino and Opera 8.x - shows equally. Safari even support AJAX used in that page - which surprised me most.

      Yeah, IE still shows that fucked up, but I will get to w
    • Unfortunately a duopoly is little better in getting people to stick to standards. As a konqueror and occasionally opera user I see a lot of sites which will work in IE and firefox but nothing else.

  • FF Usage On My Site Is High (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gasmonso (929871) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:21PM (#14494611) Homepage

    Having checked my website over the last few months, I was surprised at the statistics. Firefox has 56.15%, IE 17.48%, Mozilla 7.35% and the rest was Safari, Opera and even a few Netscape users! FF has done an incredible job thus far and I hope they continue to produce a great product. What has browser usage been like on your site?

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

  • Wow, 4.9% (Score:4, Funny)

    by cockroach2 (117475) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:21PM (#14494612) Homepage
    > although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK

    Fascinating. I never used firefox in the UK and I wouldn't have guessed that 4.9% of firefox' users did.

    Sorry.

  • ... since Firefox 1.5. Really, like Linus said [slashdot.org], I can't stand Gnome 2.10 integration.

    Konqueror is becoming better and better, and is really an alternative to firefox now

    • Quote:
      Konqueror is becoming better and better, and is really an alternative to firefox now

      Yes, I agree, in windows I use firefox, but on my Linux machines I use konqueror most of the time. It's just better. -- Better = Loads faster, and is more user friendly
    • Konqueror does indeed kick massive amounts of ass, but I still prefer Firefox. There is an ongoing effort to include usage of Qt, so we'll eventually get good Mozilla products that work well with KDE. In the meantime, I just stick with gtk-qt-engine.

  • Firefox User statistics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EraseEraseMe (167638) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:31PM (#14494704)
    I work for a company (A Canadian credit union) as a web-master.
    While a more technologically-focussed person will likely use FireFox over Internet Explorer, I can give out with reasonable certainty, statistics that encompass a large sample size of people who fall across a broad spectrum of computer skill. Anyone with a bank account and the internet has likely at one time or another logged on to their bank to check out balances, pay bills, etc.

    Looking at the statistics returned, I find:
    90.89% use IE in all it's iterations
    (97.81% of that use IE6, less than 1% per each preceding version)
    6.82% use a version of Mozilla
    (35.2% of that use 1.8, 29.48% use 1.7.12, 11% use 1.7.5)
    1.26% use Safari.

    We try to make sure that all customers have the ability to log in (It's kind of important)

    • My bank's web site is very difficult to log into using Firefox. You can't just type in the id and password and click GO. You have to figure out how to bring up the alternate login page and use it.

      I just switch to IE for banking and then go back to Firefox for other stuff.

  • Here's the actual article (Score:4, Informative)

    by savala (874118) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:34PM (#14494738)

    Percentages all over Europe [xitimonitor.com] (in french, but the pretty pictures speak for themselves).

    Not in itself all that meaningful, perhaps (other than that the average has now reached over 20% for Europe worldwide), but when you see the changes through previous editions:

    1. current [xitimonitor.com]
    2. 12 [xitimonitor.com]
    3. 11 [xitimonitor.com]
    4. 10 [xitimonitor.com]
    5. 8 [xitimonitor.com]
    6. 7 [xitimonitor.com]
    7. 6 [xitimonitor.com]

    ...you get a pretty decent idea of the growth. (Anyone want to turn that into an animated gif?)

    For the record, here's their map of the world [xitimonitor.com], showing ~15.88% in the USA, and 18.60% in Australia. And finally, the difference between percentages during the weekend and during the week appears to be 0.05% [xitimonitor.com] (if I interpret that graph correctly)

  • Dell Shipping Firefox now ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrogMan (708650) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:38PM (#14494773) Homepage
    Took delivery at ork of 3 Dell small business PC things - They all had Firefox pre-installed which surprised me. It was an older version, but even so quite nice to see for a change.
  • This reminds me from yesterday's news.

    Rather than the EU wasting resources on a Google clone, I'd rather see them investing in a browser (preferably FF, but any proprietary standards-compliant one works just as well). Of course with that line of thinking, I would hope they could also invest in Linux. If they're so afraid of an American company taking over the world and abusing its monopoly, they should start by helping its top, non-corporate-US, competitors.

  • The fact that all the measurements were... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Caspian (99221) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:42PM (#14494811)
    The fact that all the measurements were taken on a Sunday...

    ...ALSO means that a significant percentage of the churchgoing population (who, in turn, are a significant percentage of the population at large) are not included in the results. Churchgoing folks are generally conservative, and thus more likely to use more typically corporate/conservative software (thus IE).

    Probably won't alter the results much, but I'm sure it impacts them some.
    • Also, spare me the flood of anecdotal "Well, I go to church, and I use Firefox" posts. I swear, sometimes it seems like nowadays, you can't even say "most Christians are xxxxxxxxxx" without fifty people popping out of the woodwork with anecdotes of exceptions to the rule. I wonder if I could even get away with tautologies like "most Christians are Christian" or "most churchgoers go to church"...
    • >means that a significant percentage of the churchgoing population
      >(who, in turn, are a significant percentage of the population at large)

      That percentage is *not* really significant, not in the large cities of western europe anyway.

      apart from that, people can go to the church in the morning and surf the web in the afternoon. Just like people can surf in the morning and watch a football match in the afternoon.

  • 60% fewer statisticians proficient in language (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:43PM (#14494823)
    In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK.

    A. 4.9 percent of all people use Firefox in the UK?
    B. 4.9 percent of all Firefox users use it within the UK?
    C. 4.9 percent of all people residing in UK use Firefox?
    D. 4.9 percent of all internet users use Firefox in the UK?
    E. 4.9 percent of all internet users in the UK use Firefox?
    F. 4.9 percent of all Sunday morning internet users in UK use Firefox?
    G. All of the above?
    H. None of the above?

  • The reason companies don't use Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves (236787) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @05:52PM (#14494903)
    The reason so many companies use Internet Explorer is because Microsoft makes deals with them that forbid the use of any third-party software on the companies' networks. This was the case at my former company.
    • I was going to say something sarcastic about you conspiracy theory, but then I noticed your user name... Anyway, there are 2 reasons that IE is the predominant browser in the coperate world. 1. It can be easily managed using Group Policy along with the rest of the OS. 2. Integrated Windows Authentication. I use FF on my work PC, but I switch to IE whenever I need to access an Intranet site. While it is true that you could check that "Remeber password" box, my company has literally hundreds of intranet s
  • For what it's worth, here are the statistics for MagPortal.com [magportal.com] (excluding search engine spiders and other browsers) for December 2005 compared to December 2004:
    MSIE 6.0: 81.35% (down from 83.39% in Dec 2004)
    Mozilla/5.0: 15.17% (up from 8.82% in Dec 2004)
    MSIE 5.0 + 5.01 + 5.5: 2.75% (down from 7.22% in Dec 2004)
    Mozilla/4.0: 0.75% (up from 0.56% in Dec 2004)
  • I have two different sites that I use Google Analytics to track traffic on. They target very different people and the results returned are very different.

    Site #1 is WiTendoFi.com [witendofi.com]
    It is a gaming site about finding other Nintendo players online.
    1) Firefox 75%
    2) IE 16%
    3) The rest :)

    Site #2 is CSpost.com [cspost.com] (I work for them)
    It is a web based store for a lot of housewares and such.
    1) IE 75%
    2) Firefox 11%
    3) The rest :)

    The difference is of course huge, but that 11% is up from around 7-8% last year...

  • Still a little way to go (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SevenTowers (525361) on Tuesday January 17 2006, @06:49PM (#14495420) Homepage
    The firefox team has done a great job but there are still many glitches that are a pain at times:

    - You have to partly disable video acceleration for some types of content to play properly in some pages.
    - Huge memory usage. Memory leaks in some situations but I can't put my finger on what is causing it. (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5)
    - Java plugins frequently cause problems.
    - Random download manager crashes (Usually with many concurrent downloads, some of them stalled).

    Plus some little irks like the fact that if a live bookmark goes down, firefox doesn't notify you and keeps displaying the old stories indefinitely.

    It's great software, but it still has a little way to go before it's perfect.

  • Curious about Opera stats (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday January 17 2006, @07:29PM (#14495702) Homepage Journal
    It's well known that Opera has a much higher usage share in Europe than in other parts of the world. I've seen the map [xitimonitor.com] showing Firefox usage per country, but I'd like to see what the IE, Opera, and Safari figures are as well. Maybe a map that turns each country into a pie chart with the top four?
    • Nah, we're all using Konqueror...
      • Nice flaming, but I just did an impromptu experiment, just to be fair.
        FF 1.5, Opera 8.5, all extensions off.
        Initially, Firefox 21MB RAM and Opera was 17MB RAM, both opening to a tab with Google.
        I opened multiple tabs in each, same websites, alternating. Some flash (miniclip) some java (gmail) and some plain ol HTML. Throughout, memory usage was no more than 5MB apart, although I did notice Firefox using more CPU, most likely because I've increased maximum connections.
        As for the load times, side by side they
    • > a sample that is likely skewed towards the geek crowd

      I don't follow your logic. The geek "crowd" is too small to change the numbers, most of the geeks use firefox in work as well, and someone who works in front of the monitor all week, propably would not spent the day-off surfing.

      >there wasn't much you could do on a Sunday commercially

      A good reason to shop on-line then.

    • Sort of.

      In the year since Firefox hit 1.0, it's received much more attention from people trying to find security vulnerabilities than Mozilla ever did. (Check out Secunia [secunia.com] for some examples.) On the other hand, a lot of that attention was from researchers, Mozilla's had a good track record at fixing them, and there hasn't been much in the way of exploitation of those vulnerabilities.

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