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Firefox Usage Near 25% In Europe

Posted by kdawson on Mon Apr 16, 2007 06:28 PM
from the edge-of-the-wedge dept.
Mozilla The Internet IT
PARENA writes "French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%."
+ -
story

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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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  • Yeah but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by misleb (129952) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:37PM (#18759433)
    Wasn't the Amiga also popular in Europe at some point? Nothing wrong with the Amiga, just pointing out that you can't always use Europe as a gauge for success. ;-)

    -matthew

  • IE States: More Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gamefreak99 (722148) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:39PM (#18759467)
    Wouldn't it be more useful to look at the stats for Internet Explorer than those for Firefox? I'm sure many Europeans use Opera or Safari, besides just Firefox?

    Got to give props to the Firefox guys though. They're getting there :)

    • Useful for what? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by David Gould (4938) <david@dgould.org> on Monday April 16 2007, @07:38PM (#18760341) Homepage

      Wouldn't it be more useful to look at the stats for Internet Explorer than those for Firefox? I'm sure many Europeans use Opera or Safari, besides just Firefox?
      I guess that sort of depends on what you're interested in tracking: the death of IE, or the growth of Firefox.

        • Re:Useful for what? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Alphager (957739) <florianhaas AT fsfe DOT org> on Monday April 16 2007, @08:18PM (#18760989) Homepage Journal

          Well, I know Opera isn't, but aren't a bunch of other browsers based on the same engine as Firefox? Seamonkey/Mozilla, Konqueror, etc?
          Seamonkey, Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Epiphany, Flock, Nautilus, K-Melon, Maxthon all use Gecko
          Konqueror and Safari both use KHTML (although Apple has forked it and added some things KHTML still hasn't)

  • sounds way of low for home users (Score:5, Informative)

    by dattaway (3088) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:41PM (#18759503) Homepage
    I'm getting around 82% firefox, 16% IE.

    OS platforms are 88% windows, 9% Mac, and nearly 3% Linux.

    Are other people seeing this?

    • Re:sounds way of low for home users (Score:5, Insightful)

      by westlake (615356) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:58PM (#18759791)
      I'm getting around 82% firefox, 16% IE.
      OS platforms are 88% windows, 9% Mac, and nearly 3% Linux.

      This tells me nothing until I know the target audience for your site and the number of visitors.

      • This tells me nothing until I know the target audience for your site and the number of visitors.
        Dude, GP poster has an ID lower than 5000 ! He could well have the data compounded from half of internet servers, including yours. So do as every smart slashdotter would do : accept his numbers and nit-pick them a bit and pray he doesn't pull the plug from your petty web server...

        • Re:sounds way of low for home users (Score:5, Funny)

          by JanneM (7445) on Monday April 16 2007, @08:33PM (#18761229) Homepage
          Dude, GP poster has an ID lower than 5000 ! He could well have the data compounded from half of internet servers, including yours.

          Or he could have been running a Gundam doll fan site for the past five years ("They're not dolls! They're action figures!!!"), thereby solidly representing the browser choices of the still-living-at-home-at-35 demographic.

        • Re:sounds way of low for home users (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Tom (822) on Tuesday April 17 2007, @12:47AM (#18763497) Homepage Journal
          If ID counts, here's some more numbers. It's from my game site, which has a fairly broad audience (few grandfathers, but lots of fathers and kids from 11 up) from around the world:

          Firefox - 4295627 hits - 65.3 %
          MS Internet Explorer - 1651317 hits - 25.1 %
          Opera - 319524 hits - 4.8 %
          Mozilla - 127876 hits - 1.9 %
          Safari - 64764 hits - 0.9 %

          And that with IE dropping and Firefox gaining share has been a steady trend for the past 3-4 years. Maybe my site gets more early adopters, and I am actively pushing Firefox (the only banner/ad I've ever had on my site), but the trend is still there.

  • A small victory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hansamurai (907719) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Monday April 16 2007, @06:43PM (#18759531) Homepage Journal
    I'm impressed with Slovenia and Finland at over 40% penetration. Though they're relatively small countries population wise, the Firefox teams have really made a substantial impact there. These successes are what it really takes for people to notice Firefox in the mainstream. 40% probably puts them near the share Internet Explorer has locally which is definitely a great step. The article also shows Australia at 25% which is awesome. Great numbers all around, keep up the great work.

    • I'm from Slovenia ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pegasus (13291) on Tuesday April 17 2007, @01:54AM (#18763969) Homepage
      And heck, I use opera. Ffox is too slow for what I expect from "internet expirience".

      Also I maintain three of the top 10 visited sites in Slovenia (mostly by teenagers) and the stats there are:

      ie 70%, ffox 27%, opera 1.6%.
      ie 6 50%, mozilla 37%, ie 7 9%, opera 1.5%
      ie 6 60%, mozilla 29%, ie 7 7%, opera 1.6%

      So there ... I have no idea where did this survey dig those numbers.

      • Re:A small victory (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bert64 (520050) <bert@[ ]shdot.fi ... m ['sla' in gap]> on Tuesday April 17 2007, @01:24AM (#18763761) Homepage
        Regardless of who made it...

        IE:
        Has poor support for standards like CSS, and has done for years thus stunting web development. Very little has been done to fix this, even in 7.
        Has loads of outstanding rendering bugs
        Completely stagnated for 5 years, and only had development resumed due to pressure from firefox (again stunting web development)
        Supports activex, which is incredibly poorly designed and a security liability.

        I would like to write my site using modern CSS features. I can't, because people viewing the site with ie wouldn't see them properly. And rather than degrading appearane gracefully, it makes a half assed attempt at rendering the CSS resulting in a really ugly look.
        IE is a horrendously outdated browser, the sooner it dies, the sooner the web can move on.
  • 1. It mentions 96,000+ web sites were monitored for the purpose of determining this. What were they? Were they evenly distributed by raw population? By internet-using population?

    2. Does this survey make any attempt to take into account 'individual PC users' vs. 'internet cafe' users? i.e. Is this percentage of COMPUTERS or percentage of USERS? (Or, more likely, percentage of individual web hits?)

    I can't find any technical details on how this survey was conducted, other than the slight mention of number of websites involved.

    • Re:Two important questions... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Timesprout (579035) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:50PM (#18759659)
      Another question,and this is not a troll.

      For years many OSS and Firefox proponents have claimed that MS crippled the web and killed innovation with IE. Now that the IE monopoly is crumbling whats changed? I dont use either browser and frankly my browsing experience is the same as it has been for the last few years. Wheres all this innovation I was told I was missing?

      • Re:Two important questions... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2007, @07:01PM (#18759825)

        We aren't held back by everybody using Internet Explorer. We are held back because enough people use Internet Explorer. Even if only one in ten people use Internet Explorer, that's enough to force the average website to ensure compatibility.

        Furthermore, it's a vicious circle. If web developers aren't taking advantage of nifty things like SVG, then there's far less pressure on browser vendors to incorporate these features.

  • I must be ignorant (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt (596332) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:45PM (#18759577) Journal
    Whats Oceania? I thought it was a made-up supernation from Orwell's 1984.

    Firefox is fast becoming newspeak for "web browser".

      • Re:I must be ignorant (Score:5, Funny)

        by IthnkImParanoid (410494) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:55PM (#18759745)
        It's called Australia, after the only nation of any importance on it. Sort of like "America", but slightly less kick-ass.

        :p

      • Australia (Score:3, Interesting)

        by esme (17526)
        I know there are some different opinions [wikipedia.org] about how many continents there are and what they're called. But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent, and count all of the other islands as part of Asia. In fact, in American questionnaires about race, you will see the category "Asian/Pacific Islander".

        • Re:Australia (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2007, @07:11PM (#18759989)
          > But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent

          That's just demonstrating the ignorance of Americans. Australia shares land borders with several other countries, such as Queensland to the north and Victoria to the south. Calling the whole continent "Australia" while ignoring the contributions of the other countries on the continent, Oceania, just because they're not populated by westernised whites is a combination of political supremism and just plain ignorance.

              • Re:Australia (Score:4, Informative)

                by CoolMoDee (683437) on Monday April 16 2007, @08:38PM (#18761279) Homepage Journal
                Um. There is such a thing as Oceania, it covers New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and those pacific islands out there, Fiji etc. Or you know, I could have just imagined that entire portion of my geography exam...

              • Re:Australia (Score:5, Informative)

                by TempeTerra (83076) on Monday April 16 2007, @10:54PM (#18762623)
                I live there you insensitive clod! There very much is such a place as Oceania, it's a name for the region including Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and a couple of dozen other island nations in the South Pacific. It is widely used and understood in the region. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

                Normally I wouldn't take exception to poor geographical knowledge (mine is far from perfect), but some clueless mods modded you up so I feel the need to respond.

  • Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%

    I don't find that remarkable at all. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and one of the things that struck me was how Microsoft-centric the universities were. A huge percentage of the Computer Science students had never even tried an OS other than Windows! (I come from one of those sunny countries in the south of Europe, and that's where I attended university. There, the various flavours of Unix — mainly Linux of course — ruled and continue to rule inside the Computer Science department). Therefore it doesn't surprise me at all that the Dutch are still stuck in the yesteryear of Internet Explorer.

    As time passed, I realised that part of the reason for the Dutch situation has to do with a certain spirit of conformity and of "trying not to distinguish yourself too much from your peers". Granted, it has its positive sides — like a fairly equalitarian society — but also downsides like this one.

  • One by one... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frakir (760204) <ockhamrazorNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday April 16 2007, @06:52PM (#18759687)
    First IE slowly being replaced by superior FF.
    Then Open Office (or less bloated equivalents like Abiword) will come and kick out Word and al from grandma computers. Then average Joe will not be able to watch his movies on Vista and noone will have a copy of XP handy. So his 12-year old will install Ubuntu.
    And wmv and other non-open formats will die, too. People are getting burned by DRM tricks and lock-ins.

    Well... I like to dream.

  • Languages? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RealGrouchy (943109) on Monday April 16 2007, @07:31PM (#18760241)
    Could it have anything to do with how easy it is to get Firefox in your local language?

    Correct my North-American egocentrism, but aren't most of the countries listed predominantly non-English speaking?

    - RG>

  • Yeah 25% and growing. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by truckaxle (883149) on Monday April 16 2007, @08:05PM (#18760825) Homepage
    There was a time when the very real fear that if Microsoft achieve total dominance on the client that they could (and would) leverage that influence to the server by coupling new extension that only work with IE/IIS combination. The WWW would become the WMW :(

    So this increasing market share of Firefox is good news. The threat of a single client achieving complete dominance is past now, I believe - a bullet dodged.

    As an aside. I have a customer that was concerned about this several years ago and she wanted to do her part so she requested a special mod to her shopping cart that recognizes the browser and gives a "Mozilla Users Discount" for the kindred users.

    Interesting to see that it still works Sam McGees Hot Sauce [sammcgees.com]"

      • Re:Ballmer chair jokes.... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Ariastis (797888) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:37PM (#18759425)
        Your wrong. The IE team needs help moving furniture around.
        • Hmmm.... That could offer some insight as to why IE is so bad. All their furniture is broken, and the walls have gaping holes from having desks and chairs thrown through them. Their light fixtures are probably in bad shape, too.

        • Re:Ballmer chair jokes.... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2007, @07:24PM (#18760163)
          only if "excellent" means 'lucky' in Microserf-speak. Microsoft was handed a monopoly by IBM and they've ridden that monopoly all the way to the bank. Also, they've throw away 10s of billions of dollars doing nothing but preventing the real innovators in the market from profiting from excellent( the real one ) new products of their own. Failure at everything but their desktop leveraged monopoly is a good sign of 'MS-excellence'.

          did I see something about "a clue"? doh.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by daeg (828071)
      Internet Explorer works decent enough for the average user. Outside of the US, I'm betting the internationalization support of Firefox is a good promoting factor. If you could have your native language be garbled based on very picky Internet Explorer language rules and parsing, or Firefox, which would you pick?

      On a related note, I'd like to see a study as to how accurate translations are, too, when comparing FireFox (and others) to IE.

    • Re:Nice indeed, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mr_matticus (928346) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:51PM (#18759675)
      You think a country full of people who don't care about an illegal war in Iraq, the abuse of our rights at the (blatant and unveiled!) hands of our president, or any apparent concern for the finer points of logic and reasoning would actually give a crap about what browser they use?

      Their computers come with Internet Explorer, and it's good enough. They're not going to embrace Firefox just for the sake of it, because they're entirely apathetic about almost everything to begin with.

      We Americans haven't had to fight for anything or even really compete. Students don't have to learn, and people readily embrace each other when a Wikipedia link makes them think they're experts on legal and business processes (*cough*implied warranties*cough*). Complacency explains a lot, including the relatively slower uptake of Firefox.

      • Attention Dumbshit Moderators (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mr_matticus (928346) on Monday April 16 2007, @07:25PM (#18760175)
        It's not a trolling post just because you don't like it or because you don't understand it.

        Complacency and apathy is exactly the sort of reason why Microsoft still commands the desktop and why people aren't switching over to superior products like Firefox. It's also the reason why alternative fuels are struggling to take off (fossil fuels are still profitable for producers and cheap for consumers) and why it takes near-catastrophe for the United States to enact appropriate social and environmental policy.

        Since I am an American, you can take your indignation at my criticism and shove it.

    • Re:Nice indeed, but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by whoisjoe (465549) on Monday April 16 2007, @06:57PM (#18759769) Homepage
      DEAR SIR,

      HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY ESTEEMED COLLEAGUES, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO INCREASE FIREFOX USAGE 45,000,000% (FORTY-FIVE MILLION PERCENT). THE ABOVE INCREASE WILL TAKE OVER FIVE (5) YEARS.

      I ASSURE YOU THAT THIS INCREASE IS RISK FREE ON ALL SIDES.

      PLEASE REPLY URGENTLY.

      BEST REGARDS,
      DR. ABRAHAM UMBABWE

    • Because we are sick of msft's abusive practises (Score:5, Informative)

      by walterbyrd (182728) on Monday April 16 2007, @08:03PM (#18760781)
      We're sick of msft funding bogus lawsuits, lying to the US-DOJ, openly defying the EU, filing bogus patents, faking TCO studies, and faking benchmarks. We're sick of msft creating fake "think tanks" like AdTI, and using fake journalists like Enderle. We're sick of the astroturfing, and letters from dead people campaigns. We are not happy about msft stacking the deck with msft employees in the OOXML approval process.

      Need I go on?

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